The Russians: Recent Episodes

Yasha Levine & Evgenia Kovda

A podcast by Yasha Levine and Evgenia Kovda, two Soviet immigrants living through American decline.

yasha.substack.com

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit yasha.substack.com

We have our friend Anthony Galuzzo on to talk about his upcoming book, Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today, which will be published by Repeater later this year. Anthony uses John Boorman’s Zardoz — first a box office flop, now a cult film — to tell the intellectual history of utopian thought and to sketch out his own political manifesto.

Talking to Anthony, we realized that Zardoz perfectly predicts the Silicon Valley of today: a sterile techno-utopia built on global exploitation, a place where people want to live forever and where no one’s f*g or having fun. In the ep we go over all sorts of things: the politics of technology, degrowth, the Enlightenment, post-leftism, Prometheanism, Soviet cosmism, and the difficulty in getting people interested in de-consumerized and de-industrialized political alternatives today.

We last had Anthony on in August 2022 about what he’s termed “the Jetson left.”

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

—Yasha

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

Evgenia and I have Keith Gessen on to talk about Raising Raffi, his new book about being a dad and raising his son as a “Russian” in America. We discuss fatherhood, identity, Soviet immigrant literature, the war in Ukraine, Russiagate. We also make tentative plans to start an OnlyFans. In short, a wide ranging conversation.

—Yasha

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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit yasha.substack.com

This week we do another Immigrant Deprogramming episode — this one with Dasha Nekrasova, the cohost of Red Scare. We talk about her immigrant experience, her Belarusian/Russian identity, her religious journey, and her acting/directing career.

—Yasha and Evgenia

PS: Yasha was on Red Scare a few years back talking about his book, Surveillance Valley.

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

We talk about the new film — How to Blow Up a Pipeline — that was inspired by the Andreas Malm book of the same name. We discuss environmental politics and Malm’s work — things like degrowth, eco-modernism, defeatism vs direct action. Other films about environmental terrorism get a mention, including The East and Avengers: Infinity War.

In short: The film might have its flaws but we still endorse it as quality uplifting family entertainment.

—Yasha and Evgenia

Want to know more? Check out these other episodes:

The Jetsonian Left w/Anthony Galluzzo
The Politics of Technology w/Joe Costello
Christmas Special — Immigration, Capitalism, Trans Politics
…and the rest of our archive.

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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit yasha.substack.com

We’re back with another episode. In the first half hour, we chat about Russia and the war. The rest is about All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, the new Laura Poitras doc about Nan Goldin and her fight against the highly respected Sackler family — the drug dealers that unleashed the opioid epidemic and made billions hooking Americans on pills. Elite barbarity. I guess that’s the topic of this ep.

—Yasha

A couple of notes.

Early on we talk about an intercepted phone call between a big Russian music producer and a former Russian billionaire Senator in which the two criticize Putin and his war effort from an elite Russian insider perspective. You can read a translated transcript of the call. We talked about Laura Poitras and her previous documentaries in our last episode — the one about Julian Assange. Listen to it here: Triple Threat: Three films about Julian Assange.

Since I wrote a bit about nuclear contamination here in San Francisco and mentioned the work of Kate Brown on nuclear history and politics, I figured I’d repost the great interview that Evgenia and Eileen Jones did with Kate Brown a few years back — back when Evgenia still cohosted Filmsuck.

Eileen and Evgenia talked to Brown about her revisionist history of Chernobyl — Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future. They also talk about popular fictional portrayals of the disaster, including the HBO series Chernobyl, and about how they stack up against what actually happened. The ep was originally broadcast on March 20, 2020.

Filmsuck is still going strong — rebooted with Eileen Jones and her new cohost Dolores McElroy. Check them out and subscribe!

—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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit yasha.substack.com

We recently went to the local theater to watch Ithaca, a new documentary about Julian Assange that focuses on his dad’s efforts to get him out of London’s Belmarsh Prison, where he’s been held in solitary since 2019 while fighting extradition to United States on espionage charges — initially under Trump but now under Biden. Oh how things change!

To add some context to the film, we watched and discuss two other Julian Assange docs: Laura Poitras’ Risk and Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets. They amount to a decade’s worth of documentaries about Wikileaks — chronicling the increasing repression and marginalization and hopelessness of Julian and his project to change the world by freeing information.

—Yasha and Evgenia

A couple of notes on our discussion.

The three films are all very different. Of the three, Risk is probably the most interesting to watch but also the most deceptive and least informative. It gives viewers a false sense of intimacy and reality, while on the backend being very manipulative.

As we discus in the ep, most viewers probably won’t know that after Risk premiered at Cannes — and after Laura Poitras appeared and hugged on the red carpet with Wikileaks sidekick Jacob Appelbaum — Poitras re-edited the film, changing the narrative to show Julian Assange and Jacob Appelbaum not as heroes but as predators. Yasha first found out about this sneaky re-edit from Julian back in 2017 when Julian was still holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy. Julian felt betrayed and explained the re-editing of the film as Laura’s attempt to protect her reputation from a couple of things that happened not long after the film had its premier in France. One was that Jacob Appelbaum — the Tor Project frontman with whom Laura was intimately involved with — was accused of being a sexual predator and was then cancelled by the privacy community. The second was that Julian became fully toxic in liberal circles during the 2016 presidential election: he was seen as a Russian asset who backed Trump over Hillary and released all those damaging emails.

So as Julian explained: because of all of this Poitras had to betray her two friends — one of whom was in captivity, the other who used to be her lover — to make sure she came out of these scandals clean, even though she had no problem with any of this until it became public and a problem for her career. It was a tangled, gross situation.

“I think it’s mostly defensive. She’s the daughter of a billionaire, and has an apartment in Tribecca, Manhattan,” Julian wrote to Yasha back then. “But she’s pretty simple. She aspires to maximise her status among the Tribecca/Greenwich Village, etc. set.”

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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit yasha.substack.com

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.

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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit yasha.substack.com

In this ep we talk to Masha Surazhsky to get an update on her Ukrainian refugee saga.

Evgenia and I previously talked to Masha in April — when she was going through hell trying to get both her elderly aunt and a family friend, who is a minor, out of Poland and into America. Since then things have stabilized: Masha is helping her friend fit into a new life as a war refugee in Brighton Beach, while the rest of the family is stuck in Ukraine. Masha’s aunt, meanwhile, has decided to take the risk and return to her hometown of Kharkov. She’s not alone. Plenty of Ukrainians, faced with a precarious existence refugee in Europe and elsewhere, have been making the same choice.

—Yasha

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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

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

PS: 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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

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

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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

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

A couple of notes.

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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

Capitalism — save us and forgive us! Russia, 1991

For this ep of The Russians Evgenia and I talk to Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov about his thoughts on the war and what led to it. We wanted to talk to Andrei because of a great essay he wrote about the collapse of the Soviet Union, “The Long Shadow of the Anti-communist Russian Revolution.”

Andrei identifies with being a Russian liberal, while being very critical of them. He explains their mindset during the late Soviet Union and in today’s Russia really well.

As he told us:

“We were not a precariat…we had the minimum without realizing it and we were safe and able to entertain our fantasies about being White Guard officers, about all this conservative paraphernalia…and it did have very long lasting political consequences. Aesthetics of it merged into political conservatism in 1991 and uncritical support of neoliberalism, and that was tragic. We were bombarding the speechless people who were very confused that not only is theft of collective property ok, but it is moral. It’s democracy, guys. And now comes the revenge. History itself and, ironically, the west helps ordinary Russians punish the liberals.”

Listen to the interview and be sure check out Andrei’s great films, including his doc Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case and The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes. His last film caused a huge scandal in America and Europe and was the focus of a long and sleazy and largely successful attempt by Bill Browder to smear Andrei and to censor the film. Watch it online here.

—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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

Today on The Russians, Evgenia and I talk to Alexei Yurchak about his work on Lenin and the history and politics of the ongoing preservation of Lenin’s body and the secretive lab that carries out the job. He is currently finishing a book about the topic, which he expects to be out in time for the 100-year anniversary of Lenin’s embalmment.

Alexei is a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley. He is probably best known for coining the term “hypernormalization” — a concept that Adam Curtis built a whole documentary around a few years ago and even called the film “HyperNormalisation.”

A couple of notes.

Alexei Yurchak’s book on Lenin’s body is not out yet, but you can get a preview by reading a paper he published on the topic a few years ago: “Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty.”

Towards the end of the episode, we discuss Sergey Kuryokhin’s infamous 1991 stunt on Leningrad TV about Lenin being a mushroom. Here is the paper Alexei referenced: “A Parasite From Outer Space: How Sergei Kurekhin proved that Lenin was a mushroom.”

Alexei mentioned a book on Lenin he liked. Here it is: Lenin's Last Struggle. There’s also another book rec he gave, one about parasites.

And of course he’s a link to Alexei’s book — Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More.

—Yasha Levine

Want to know more? Listen to our episode on Adam Curtis: “Adam Curtis, get out of my head.” And 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 yasha.substack.com/subscribe

Today on The Russians, Evgenia and I talk to Masha Surazhsky who has been going through hell for the past month trying to get her elderly aunt and a family friend who is a minor — both of whom fled Ukraine amidst Russia’s invasion — out of Poland and to America.

After a month, her Ukrainian aunt is still stuck in Warsaw with little help from anyone, except her family in America — all while the cost of housing has doubled or even tripled there, with some locals taking advantage of the desperate situation to make money from all the refugees streaming into their country. In the meantime, Liza, the 17-year-old family friend from Ukraine that Masha was chaperoning and was planning to sponsor in America, has been separated from her at the border earlier this week and treated like a prisoner, not a young woman war refugee — kept in horrible conditions, her phone and belongings taken away, aggressively interrogated, not allowed to speak Russian to Masha over the phone. At the time that we’re publishing this, she is still in detention and is being sent to a privatized ICE facility somewhere in New York State. Her future in America remains uncertain.

Masha gives us a sense of what the Ukrainian refugee situation and process looks like — both in Ukraine, in Poland, and at the border with Tijuana, the only border where the Biden Administration will process Ukrainian war refuges. As Masha explains to us, it quickly became clear to her in Europe and now here in America that despite all the pro-Ukrainian flag waving and slogans from American politicians, America is doing very little to help Ukrainian refugees displaced by this war. Congress and the Biden Administration approved sending billions in weapons and military aid to Ukraine in record time. Helping refugees — mostly women, children, and the elderly? Other publishing press releases, it’s doing pretty much nothing at all.

—Yasha Levine

UPDATE: Here is Masha’s GoFundMe page to help her cover expenses of relocating and supporting her aunt and three other women refugees. Please give if you can!

“I am now faced with the daunting task of relocating Liza to reunite with her and resettle her into a new life in America within the comfort of my home as quickly as possible. This is against the backdrop of an infamously cruel immigration system here in the United States. In addition to this, I must pay for the housing expenses of Natali, my aunt, and Liza's best friend who remain stuck in Warsaw, Poland, where they have yet to receive any support and do not have any funds after fleeing the war in Ukraine. This process will continue until we are all able to reunite, hopefully.”

Listen to previous episodes of The Russians. And…subscribe!

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

This war’s been going on for a month now. Evgenia and I sit down to talk about it. Some of the things we discuss: the ridiculous online discourse around this war and the championing of Putin as some sort of anti-imperialist defender of the global south, how formerly privileged Russian liberals are having a sudden moment of clarity about their role in whitewashing Putin’s feudal rule, sanctions…and much, much more.

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

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

We continue our Immigrant Deprogramming series by talking to Denis Lavinski, an artist in LA, who was raised in the White Russian/Vlasovite-influenced Russian Orthodox Church in California by his Soviet immigrant parents.

Denis’s childhood experience is interesting and relevant today because the ideology he grew up in is basically the ideology that Putin stole and has been repackaging to legitimize his rule. You can see it on full display in Russia right now being used to prop up his regime change war in Ukraine — a mixture of Russian imperialism, nationalism, and Russian Orthodoxy, with Soviet WWII glory moments thrown in to round out the mess.

A couple of notes and thoughts…

This is a preview of a full episode that is only available to subscribers. To hear the rest, sign up and listen here.

Check out our previous Immigrant Deprogramming episodes in the archive. And don’t forget to check out Denis’s art work on Instagram…and follow him on Twitter.

—Yasha Levine

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

Thousands and maybe even tens of thousands of Russians have fled the country in a panic following Putin’s regime change invasion of Ukraine — going to wherever they can: Georgia, Turkey, Armenia, Dubai, the EU. To get a sense of what’s going on and who is fleeing and what people are thinking, we talk to Anna, an old friend of Evgenia’s from her school days, who is currently in Istanbul and among Russians who have fled.

The picture we get is that there are two basic groups of people fleeing Russia. One is journalists and opposition media types. The second is a lot of freaked out people — those who have some money and are scared of what might come next, like a military draft or totally closed borders. Anna thinks that lot of people in the second category will ultimately return to Russia is things stabilize because…well…it’s not like there are big opportunities waiting for them in the west, unless they're programmers or computer engineers.

This is a preview of a full episode that is only available to subscribers. To hear the rest, sign up and listen here.

—Yasha Levine

Listen to our previous episodes…including the last two we did on the Russia’s war in Ukraine.

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

“Operation Z”

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

A week into Putin’s regime change war, Evgenia and I sit down to talk about our thoughts on what’s happening and about what we’re hearing from friends and family in Russia. On one side, it’s clear there are a lot of people totally backing Putin’s “humanitarian intervention” — for instance, my mom’s childhood friend in St. Petersburg screamed at her that “Putin is God” and that “he’s saving the Russian people.” On the other, a lot of Russians are shocked and totally terrified by what’s happening, and a good number of people are fleeing as best they can to wherever they can — Georgia, Azerbaijan, Israel, Turkey, European countries.

It’s obvious this war is splitting society in a big way. And Putin’s propagandists are working overtime, using the only thing that still sort of binds Russia together: a kind of aggrieved nationalism and the memory of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany.

In a way, this regime change war is brining to conclusion a societal split that began in earnest in 2011 — when Putin turned his back on big city liberals and started pumping up support among Russia’s silent majority. Or, as Evgenia puts it, what’s emerged now is a coalition of ruling elite vampires and the “zombies” that Russian liberals love to mock. Operation Z.

—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.

Catch up on some old eps:

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

China's Olympic Menace and Immigrant Deprogramming with Carl Zha

The Ayahuasca Special

Christmas Special: Ghost of Epstein

St. Paul of Amsterdam

…more

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

Putin shocked and surprised pretty much everyone in Russia by launching a regime change war on Ukraine. Two days before that, he went on Russian TV and gave a menacing grievance speech — in which he attacked America but also went after the Bolsheviks, blaming the disintegration of the Soviet Union and today’s crisis in Ukraine squarely on Lenin.

Evgenia and I discuss his speech and talk about how it fits into the mushy national identity that Putin’s elite has been trying to cobble together for Russia.

—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.

Catch up on some old eps:

China's Olympic Menace and Immigrant Deprogramming with Carl Zha

“Navalny,” the documentary

The Ayahuasca Special

Christmas Special: Ghost of Epstein

St. Paul of Amsterdam

Immigrant Deprogramming with Nika Dubrovsky

Imaginary Futures with Richard Barbrook

Behind the Silicon Curtain

The Soviet Jew & good riddance Los Feliz

“I didn’t want to live in a simulacrum of American life in the ruins of the Soviet Union”

Watching American movies in the USSR ft. Boris Levine

Anti-Soviet identities in the USSR

The End

Breeders

Adam Curtis, get out of my head

Navalny, the Kremlin, and the curse of neoliberalism

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

In this ep Evgenia and I talk about Inventing Anna, the new show that just landed on Netflix based on the story of Anna Sorokin — a young Russian immigrant from Germany who tried scamming her way into New York’s global elite a few years back.

—Yasha Levine

PS: Towards the end of the show we mention Mark Ames’ great piece about the tragic story of a different ambitious Anna — an Anna Loginova — who tried making it in Moscow…

This is a preview of a full episode that is only available to subscribers. To get the rest, sign up and listen here.

Catch up on some old eps:

China's Olympic Menace and Immigrant Deprogramming with Carl Zha

“Navalny,” the documentary

The Ayahuasca Special

Christmas Special: Ghost of Epstein

St. Paul of Amsterdam

Immigrant Deprogramming with Nika Dubrovsky

Imaginary Futures with Richard Barbrook

Behind the Silicon Curtain

The Soviet Jew & good riddance Los Feliz

“I didn’t want to live in a simulacrum of American life in the ruins of the Soviet Union”

Watching American movies in the USSR ft. Boris Levine

Anti-Soviet identities in the USSR

The End

Breeders

Adam Curtis, get out of my head

Navalny, the Kremlin, and the curse of neoliberalism

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

In this ep Evgenia and I are joined by Carl Zha to talk about the insane reaction — including accusations of treason and betrayal — coming out of U.S. media after American skier Eileen Gu decided to compete for China. We then transition to talking about Carl’s experience as a Chinese immigrant growing up in America.

This is a preview of a full episode that is only available to subscribers. To get the rest, sign up and listen here.

If you don’t know Carl, he runs the great “Silk and Steal” podcast about Chinese history and culture. He’s being constantly libeled in western media as some sort sneaky propagandist for the Chinese government because he offers a balanced view of his homeland and not the constant China bashing that’s expected from immigrants like him — a topic that we get into in our interview. Check him out on Patreon and YouTube.

—Yasha Levine

Catch up on some old eps:

“Navalny,” the documentary

The Ayahuasca Special

Christmas Special: Ghost of Epstein

St. Paul of Amsterdam

Immigrant Deprogramming with Nika Dubrovsky

Imaginary Futures with Richard Barbrook

Behind the Silicon Curtain

The Soviet Jew & good riddance Los Feliz

“I didn’t want to live in a simulacrum of American life in the ruins of the Soviet Union”

Watching American movies in the USSR ft. Boris Levine

Anti-Soviet identities in the USSR

The End

Breeders

Adam Curtis, get out of my head

Navalny, the Kremlin, and the curse of neoliberalism

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

A new “Navalny” documentary was all the rage a few days ago, when it won several awards at the Sundance Film Festival. We review this shallow, predictable film and talk about the larger political situation in Russia — something that’s completely missing from the doc.

—Yasha Levine

This is a preview of a full episode that is only available to subscribers. To get the rest, sign up and listen here.

A couple of notes.

We mention Evgenia’s mockumentary — Changemaker — which perfectly captures the essence of the kind of filmmaker who directs a film like “Navalny.” And we reference a couple of old episodes, so check them out if you haven’t already:

Russians Against Politics

“I didn’t want to live in a simulacrum of American life in the ruins of the Soviet Union”

Navalny, the Kremlin, and the curse of neoliberalism

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

For this ep we have something special for you: Evgenia and I talk about a trip we took a few years ago to the jungles of Peru for an ayahuasca retreat. We thought we were going to commune with an ancient spirit. Instead we got plunged right back into something very familiar: our own sad, atomized society.

This is a preview of a full episode that is only available to subscribers. To get the rest,sign up and listen here.

Evgenia in our palatial accommodations, enjoying a respite from the ceremony.

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

We got a Christmas Eve Special for you. Evgenia and I talk about the Epstein case and the reaction to it here in America. The starting point of our discussion is a comment Evgenia made a while ago: “One thing confuses me. I’m not American so I don’t fully know the culture. Do people really expect...and are people outraged that the people in power are not upright citizens? If we roll back history, weren’t feudal lords known for raping peasants? I’m talking about basic stuff!”

Merry Christmas and Happy Listening!

This is a preview. To listen to the full episode, subscribe.

—Yasha Levine

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

Welcome back for another episode of The Russians.

Today we talk about Paul Verhoeven’s latest movie, Benedetta, and what unites Verhoeven and Todd Solondz. We also get into Philip K. Dick and how starting a religious cult is the only answer to the problems plaguing society right now.

—Evgenia and Yasha

Listen to our previous episodes:

Episode #17: Immigrant Deprogramming with Nika Dubrovsky

Episode #16: Imaginary Futures with Richard Barbrook

Episode #15: Behind the Silicon Curtain

Episode #14: The Soviet Jew & good riddance Los Feliz

Episode #13: Immigrant Deprogramming with Anna/Аня

Episode #12: “I didn’t want to live in a simulacrum of American life in the ruins of the Soviet Union”

Episode #11: Watching American movies in the USSR ft. Boris Levine

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

For this installment of our ongoing Immigrant Deprogramming series, we talk with a truly special and impressive guest: Nika Dubrovsky — artist, author, and partner of the late David Graeber.

This is a preview. To listen to the entire episode, please subscribe.

Listen to our previous episodes:

Episode #16: Imaginary Futures with Richard Barbrook

Episode #15: Behind the Silicon Curtain

Episode #14: The Soviet Jew & good riddance Los Feliz

Episode #13: Immigrant Deprogramming with Anna/Аня

Episode #12: “I didn’t want to live in a simulacrum of American life in the ruins of the Soviet Union”

Episode #11: Watching American movies in the USSR ft. Boris Levine

Episode #10: Anti-Soviet identities in the USSR

…and more.

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

On the last episode we talked about the Californian Ideology, for this ep we have on the man himself: Richard Barbrook, who co-coined the term and co-wrote the infamous essay back in 1995. He’s still alive and he’s still got all sorts of things to say — about the origins of the Internet, the Cold War Left, Bolshevism, cybernetic communism, YouTube documentaries, China, etc.

Check it out…and subscribe!

Listen to our previous episodes:

Episode #15: Behind the Silicon Curtain

Episode #14: The Soviet Jew & good riddance Los Feliz

Episode #13: Immigrant Deprogramming with Anna/Аня

Episode #12: “I didn’t want to live in a simulacrum of American life in the ruins of the Soviet Union”

Episode #11: Watching American movies in the USSR ft. Boris Levine

Episode #10: Anti-Soviet identities in the USSR

…and more.

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

We’re back! And we have a new episode from San Francisco, where it looks like we’ll be living for a while. Evgenia and I talk about the enduring power of The Californian Ideology, despite the obvious cracks in it. And I talk about about how it feels to back in here — the place where I spent my formative immigrant years — after moving away for twenty years.

We’ll be back on a regular schedule from now on.

—Yasha Levine

PS: This is a preview. Subscribe to listen to the whole episode.

Check out our previous episodes:

Episode #14: The Soviet Jew & good riddance Los Feliz

Episode #13: Immigrant Deprogramming with Anna/Аня

Episode #12: “I didn’t want to live in a simulacrum of American life in the ruins of the Soviet Union”

Episode #11: Watching American movies in the USSR ft. Boris Levine

Episode #10: Anti-Soviet identities in the USSR

Episode #9: The End

Episode #8: Breeders

Episode #7: Adam Curtis, get out of my head

Episode #6: Navalny, the Kremlin, and the curse of neoliberalism

Episode #5: The Serf aka Холоп

Episode #4: Palestine and Soviet Jews

Episode #3: Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva w/Thierry Marignac

Episode #2: All the Sad Soviet Immigrant Lit

Episode #1: Russians Against Politics

Episode #0: The Ukrainian-Canadian left & Chrystia Freeland's Nazi grandpa

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

Evgenia and I talk about my decision to serialize my new book — The Soviet Jew: A Weaponized Immigrant’s Tale — and the difficulty of writing and thinking about what is essentially a taboo topic in this country: a “saved” immigrant who is not content with the American way of life.

—Yasha Levine

PS: We briefly discuss a special agitprop Passover prayer booklet — a Haggadah — that I discovered while doing research for the book. It was created as part of the American movement to save Soviet Jews from communism. It has an interesting segment where it celebrates modern plagues that were unleashed by God on the Soviet Union because it would not let out its Jews — just like what happed with Egypt back in the day. But instead of blood and locusts, the USSR got hit with much less dramatic weapons — like the loss of scientific genius and international respect. Still, this Haggadah wasn’t wrong. Didn’t the godless commies at least take a little peek at the bible? Everyone knows our petty God gets angry when you don’t let us out!

Here are a couple of photos just so you can get a visual.

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

In this ep Evgenia and I interview Anna/Аня, a fellow member of California’s Soviet immigrant community. We talk about why her parents left Leningrad and Baku, what it was like to grow up immersed in schizoid Soviet immigrant culture, and why she ultimately turned against Zionism and much of the politics of that world.

Check it out, and follow Anna/Аня on Twitter at @bademjanbitch.

This is a preview. The full episode is only available to full subscribers.

Check out our previous episodes:

Episode #12: “I didn’t want to live in a simulacrum of American life in the ruins of the Soviet Union”

Episode #11: Watching American movies in the USSR ft. Boris Levine

Episode #10: Anti-Soviet identities in the USSR

Episode #9: The End

Episode #8: Breeders

Episode #7: Adam Curtis, get out of my head

Episode #6: Navalny, the Kremlin, and the curse of neoliberalism

Episode #5: The Serf aka Холоп

Episode #4: Palestine and Soviet Jews

Episode #3: Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva w/Thierry Marignac

Episode #2: All the Sad Soviet Immigrant Lit

Episode #1: Russians Against Politics

Episode #0: The Ukrainian-Canadian left & Chrystia Freeland's Nazi grandpa

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

This week Evgenia Kovda and I talk to my dad Boris about American movies he watched in Leningrad and the effect they had on him. What’s funny is that many of the films he remembers were clearly picked and shown for ideological reasons — they showed the dark underbelly of American capitalism: poverty, political corruption, criminal syndicates. But the Soviet propaganda managers in charge of picking them turned out to be inept and clueless. Because the films had the opposite effect: they made him like America, and ultimately contributed to his decision to get himself and his family out of the USSR.

It’s not surprising. To my dad — who spent the first years of his life living in a log cabin in a gulag settlement — even the poor and exploited Americans in these films looked like they were doing alright. I bet most people in the Soviet Union thought pretty much the same thing.

—Yasha Levine

This is a preview. To listen to the full episode, go here and subscribe!

Check out our previous episodes:

Episode #10: Anti-Soviet identities in the USSR

Episode #9: The End

Episode #8: Breeders

Episode #7: Adam Curtis, get out of my head

Episode #6: Navalny, the Kremlin, and the curse of neoliberalism

Episode #5: The Serf aka Холоп

Episode #4: Palestine and Soviet Jews

Episode #3: Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva w/Thierry Marignac

Episode #2: All the Sad Soviet Immigrant Lit

Episode #1: Russians Against Politics

Episode #0: The Ukrainian-Canadian left & Chrystia Freeland's Nazi grandpa

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

Andrei Tarkovsky on the set of Stalker.

In this ep Evgenia and I talk about Jewish nationalism and other identities that started cropping up in the Soviet Union in 1960s and 1970s, when disillusionment began to set in with the boomer generation. While some discovered Zionism and Judaism, others got baptized — like Evgenia’s dad and uncle did.

—Yasha Levine

PS: Evgenia mentioned an essay on socialist realism by a Soviet writer named Andrei Sinyavsky, who went by the pen name Abram Tertz. You can read it in English, along with his novel — The Trial Begins.

Check out our previous episodes:

Episode #9: The End

Episode #8: Breeders

Episode #7: Adam Curtis, get out of my head

Episode #6: Navalny, the Kremlin, and the curse of neoliberalism

Episode #5: The Serf aka Холоп

Episode #4: Palestine and Soviet Jews

Episode #3: Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva w/Thierry Marignac

Episode #2: All the Sad Soviet Immigrant Lit

Episode #1: Russians Against Politics

Episode #0: The Ukrainian-Canadian left & Chrystia Freeland's Nazi grandpa

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

This is a low energy episode, befitting our new lowly status. We return to the topic of having a baby. We talk about ayahuasca trips, the anti-climactic nature of having a child, and America’s schizophrenic baby culture, where one of the first things Evgenia heard in the hospital after giving birth was: “Congratulations on your bundle of joy!!!! H’mmmm, just a few questions. Are you thinking of harming yourself or your baby?” — and much, much more.

This is a preview. The full episode is only available to full subscribers.

—Yasha Levine

Check out our previous episodes:

Episode #8: Breeders

Episode #7: Adam Curtis, get out of my head

Episode #6: Navalny, the Kremlin, and the curse of neoliberalism

Episode #5: The Serf aka Холоп

Episode #4: Palestine and Soviet Jews

Episode #3: Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva w/Thierry Marignac

Episode #2: All the Sad Soviet Immigrant Lit

Episode #1: Russians Against Politics

Episode #0: The Ukrainian-Canadian left & Chrystia Freeland's Nazi grandpa

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

Evgenia at the LA River.

We’re about to become parents so this ep has serious breeder energy. We start off by talking about Evgenia’s recent great essay on “procreation horror” and then we move on, riffing on things like fertility under neoliberalism, Soviet bourgeois family life, dogs as baby replacements, and having children as a consumer choice.

—Yasha Levine

Notes: Evgenia mentioned Natalya Baranskaya, who wrote stories about what life was like for women in the Soviet Union. She also mentioned Eternal Eve, a history of gynecology.

Check out our previous episodes…and subscribe:

Episode #0: The Ukrainian-Canadian left & Chrystia Freeland's Nazi grandpa

Episode #1: Russians Against Politics

Episode #2: All the Sad Soviet Immigrant Lit

Episode #3: Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva w/Thierry Marignac

Episode #4: Palestine and Soviet Jews

Episode #5: The Serf aka Холоп

Episode #6: Navalny, the Kremlin, and the curse of neoliberalism

Episode #7: Adam Curtis, get out of my head

Intro song: American Boy by Комбинация.

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

In this ep we talk about Adam Curtis and our lack of excitement about his latest doc series, and how it’s gotten to the point that the promotional interviews he does are better than the films he’s promoting. Has Curtis gotten boring and repetitive, or are we so overwhelmed with information that his hypnotic propaganda style has lost its potency?

Towards the end Evgenia introduces the concept of “senilism” — an art idea developed by a Soviet artist after he moved to America. It’s perfect for our decaying empire and its stagnant capitalist realism. Embrace senility!

Missed our previous episodes?

Episode #0: The Ukrainian-Canadian left & Chrystia Freeland's Nazi grandpa

Episode #1: Russians Against Politics

Episode #2: All the Sad Soviet Immigrant Lit

Episode #3: Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva w/Thierry Marignac

Episode #4: Palestine and Soviet Jews

Episode #5: The Serf aka Холоп

Episode #6: Navalny, the Kremlin, and the curse of neoliberalism

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

Separated at birth — a young Navalny and a young Yeltsin.

Alexei Navalny — returned from the novichok-dead — is back in Russia, back in jail, and back in the news. Protests have been taking place in cities all across the country with people calling for his release, and it’s pretty clear that the poisoning and the new jail term have only increased Navalny’s cult political status. He’s become an almost mythical figure now, beating death itself in order to save Russia from Vladimir Putin and to lead the Russian people to freedom.

It makes sense that people are getting caught up in the recent life and death drama of the Navalny story. I mean, how can you not. But Evgenia and I talk about something a bit deeper — something’s that’s usually left unsaid in both Russian and western media circles.

What are Navalny politics? And what are the politics of the movement he now leads? Besides being broadly against corruption and opposing Putin’s soft-authoritarian grip on power, what do they actually believe in?

One important point we make is that there is no substantive ideological and political differences between the politics of Putin’s neoliberal clan of oligarchs, bureaucrats, and security goons and those of Navalny’s liberal opposition — an opposition that wants to replace Putin’s rule with itself. Aside form maybe some cultural and clique differences, they’re both various flavors of neoliberalism, or what in the Russian context, you’d call “liberalism.” Evgenia and I have been yelled at online by both Americans and Russians for pointing this out, but it’s true.

One dead giveaway that Navalny’s a neoliberal: he is not against the criminal privatization of the Soviet Union’s industries and resources that happened under Boris Yeltsin — a process that not only created Russia’s corrupt oligarchical political system but also put Putin into power. As surprising as it may seem for all his talk about corruption, Navalny is not against oligarchs as a class. He praises “good” oligarchs — especially western oligarchs — like he does with Warren Buffet and Bill Gates in his viral Putin’s Place doc. From what we can tell, Navalny is only against bad Russian oligarchs — Putin’s oligarchs — because they made money through corruption.

To Navalny, what makes Putin’s oligarchs bad is that they’re not like Bill Gates, one of the richest people on the planet who has his own “Gates Palace” rivaling Putin’s.

Another point we make is that Navalny’s cultural and political positions — not just just his deep neoliberalism, but his nationalism and his racism against people from Central Asia and the Caucuses and the antisemitic and homophobic outbursts he was prone to when he wasn’t as famous as he is now — are inline with the Russian mainstream. They are also very much in line with the politics of his most important base of support: Russia’s entrepreneurial and professional class — starting with the petite bourgeoise and reaching all the way into the lower levels of the oligarchy. In short, he’s very much a man of his time and place.

Anyway, take a listen…

…the full episode is only available to full subscribers. Support our work, subscribe.

—Yasha Levine

Missed our previous episodes?

Episode #0: The Ukrainian-Canadian left & Chrystia Freeland's Nazi grandpa

Episode #1: Russians Against Politics

Episode #2: All the Sad Soviet Immigrant Lit

Episode #3: Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva w/Thierry Marignac

Episode #4: Palestine and Soviet Jews

Episode #5: The Serf aka Холоп

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

In this episode, Evgenia and I talk about the newest Russian film sensation: Serf — a comedy of the Russian oligarchy, by the Russian oligarchy.

It’s a truly funny film and it says a lot more about Russian politics and culture today than its director and screenwriters realize. Russia truly has regressed to the 19th century. Its liberated serfs have become the lords.

—Yasha Levine

PS: The show notes — which include links to some of the things we discuss in the episode — are available only to subscribers and will be published shortly. Here they are. So…subscribe!

Missed our previous episodes?

Episode #0: The Ukrainian Canadian left & Chrystia Freeland's Nazi grandpa

Episode #1: Russians Against Politics

Episode #2: All the Sad Soviet Immigrant Lit

Episode #3: Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva w/Thierry Marignac

Episode #4: Palestine and Soviet Jews

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

Eating knafeh in Nablus.

In this episode Evgenia and I talk about a short trip we took to Palestine last year and get into all sorts of related topics — Zionism, the occupation, nationalism, Israel’s weaponization of Soviet and Russian Jewish immigrants, Jews vs. Jew hatred. We also talk about our unexpected and surprising stay at Banksy’s hotel in occupied Bethelham — surprising because we accidentally stumbled onto what might be the only example of effective political art that I’ve seen in my life…in the shape of a cheesy boutique hotel. And I don’t even like Banksy’s art very much.

—Yasha Levine

This is a preview of a full episode that is only available to subscribers. To listen to the rest, sign up here.

A massive door in the occupation wall that runs through Bethelham, which the Israeli army uses to come in for their ops. Notice the remote controlled “skunk” cannon on the left-hand side. People told us Israelis use it to disperse locals by dousing them with a noxious liquid.

A security tower overlooking the Aida refugee camp in Bethelham.

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

Eating knafeh in Nablus.

In this episode Evgenia and I talk about a short trip we took to Palestine last year and get into all sorts of related topics — Zionism, the occupation, nationalism, Israel’s weaponization of Soviet and Russian Jewish immigrants, Jews vs. Jew hatred. We also talk about our unexpected and surprising stay at Banksy’s hotel in occupied Bethelham — surprising because we accidentally stumbled onto what might be the only example of effective political art that I’ve seen in my life…in the shape of a cheesy boutique hotel. Come for the Banksy art, stay for the anti-Zionist indoctrination and agitprop! It works. And I don’t even like Banksy’s art very much.

—Yasha Levine

PS: One thing I wanted to talk about was my own personal experience with a flash of anti-Soviet/Russian racism in Israel when I was 16. I didn’t get a chance to, so I’ll write it up in a newsletter soon. [UPDATE: here it is.]

And since we talk quite a bit about Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel in Bethelham — which overlooks a chunk of the occupation wall that runs right through the city — I figured you might want to see what it and the area around it looks like.

The view from our hotel room.

Same view at night.

The Wall

A massive door in the occupation wall that runs through Bethelham, which the Israeli army uses to come in for their ops. Notice the remote controlled “skunk” cannon on the left-hand side. It’s used to disperse people by dousing them with a noxious liquid.

A close up of the skunk cannon.

A security tower overlooking the Aida refugee camp in Bethelham.

A portion of the wall that runs right through a Palestinian cemetery.

Evgenia and Banksy art in the lobby.

Heading north on a road just outside of Jerusalem.

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

Eduard and Natalia in Paris, 1989.

In our last episode Evgenia and I talked about the sad state of Soviet immigrant literature produced today. In this episode we look on the bright side: we talk to French cult author Thierry Marignac about the bigger-than-life lives of his friends Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva, who — among other things — together produced the best literature of the third wave of Soviet immigration.

Eduard — a novelist and the infamous founder of the avant-garde National-Bolshevik Party — passed away earlier this year. Natalia died in 2003. A singer and a model who was married for a long time to Eduard Limonov when they lived in Paris, she is not well known as an author — but her novel and her short stories about her immigrant experience and her short modeling career in 1970s Los Angeles (she was on the first album of the Cars) are incredibly funny and dark. I think she wrote the best Soviet immigrant lit there is. Sadly none of it translated into English so we can’t share it with you.

—Yasha Levine

This is a preview of a full episode that is only available to subscribers. To listen to the rest, sign up here.

Thierry and his girlfriend in Paris, 1985.

Natalia on the cover of the first Cars album, 1978.

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

We’re about three months late but Evgenia and I finally did it: we recorded episode #2 of our Immigrants as a Weapon podcast. This one’s important — a topic we talk and complain about a lot in our household: the utterly sad and pathetic state of Soviet immigrant literature that’s being produced today.

Pretty much every generation of Soviet and Russian immigrants — going back to the Russian Revolution and all the way through the dissident and Jewish immigration waves of the 1970s and 1980s — had produced at least some worthwhile literature and at least a few notable writers. But that’s not true of the generation of Soviet immigrants working today.

We discuss the most celebrated and well-known of these authors, including people like Gary Shteyngart, Peter Pomerantsev, and the Gessen clan — Masha and Keith. And we try to figure out why today’s Soviet immigrant lit is so bland and forgettable.

This is a preview of a full podcast episode that is only available to subscribers. To get listen to the rest, sign up here. Perks include your own podcast RSS feed.

—Yasha Levine and Evgenia Kovda

PS: Listen to our first episode — “Russians Against Politics” — where we talk about the neoliberalism that pervades the post-Soviet world and Russians’ rabid response to Black Lives Matter. And…subscribe!

Intro song: American Boy by Комбинация.

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

In this episode, Evgenia Kovda takes over and we talk about something that might come as a surprise to a lot of people. It’s the rabid pro-police reaction of most Russians in Russia (and abroad) to the Black Lives Matter protests taking place in America.

While CNN and the New York Times run segments that blame “the Russians” for using the protests to destabilize America, in Russia the exact opposite is taking place: The Russian government — and most of Russian society — is firmly against the protests. Russian society stands with the police. It stands in solidarity with America’s political establishment.

There are two main parts to the episode.

In the first hour, we get into the details of how these protests are depicted in the Russian media. What we see is that there is no real difference between the Kremlin and the liberal opposition. They’re both united in their hatred and condemnation.

But we really get warmed up and going in the second hour, when we try to figure out why Russian society is so united against these protests. It’s a complicated question. But on a bigger more conceptual level, we think it has to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the total negation of the Russian Revolution that followed it.

—Yasha Levine

PS: Subscribe!

Recorded on June 16, 2020.

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

Somewhere in Nazi-occupied Ukraine during WWII. From the personal files of Chrystia Freeland’s grandpa, Michael Chomiak. Courtesy of Alex Boykowich.

For the first episode of Immigrants as a Weapon Radio, I talk to Alex Boykowich, who is one of the people responsible for surfacing information about Chrystia Freeland’s Nazi collaborator grandfather a few years ago.

If you don’t know, Chrystia Freeland is Canada’s deputy prime minister. She has spent most of her career — first as a journalist, then as Canada’s powerful Foreign Minister, and now as as Deputy Prime Minister — praising her grandfather’s legacy and whitewashing his past. Alex’s find caused a minor political scandal in Canada — which was immediately blamed on Putin and Russian disinformation.

But it definitely wasn’t Russian disinfo. Among other things, her grandpa ran a Ukrainian-language newspaper out of Nazi-occupied Krakow, Poland — a paper that praised Hitler, ran giant ads for Ukrainian SS recruitment, spread antisemitic propaganda, and pumped out vile garbage that helped justify the mass slaughter of Jews, Poles and Russians. The story was first reported by John Helmer and Telesur — based on information that Alex dug up in the archives.

We talk about a bunch of things beyond just Chrystia Freeland and her Nazi collaborator grandpa. Among them, Alex gets into the little-known, sordid history of how Canada’s Ukrainian fascist-right waged a war against Canada’s much older and much larger Ukrainian left and progressive community — and did so with the full backing of the Canadian state. In short: Canada loves its Nazi collaborators!

—Yasha Levine

PS: If you haven’t already, read my previous letters on Chrystia Freeland’s Nazi family past and why it matters today:

Chrystia Freeland and Canadian Nazi collabos — “Canada’s aggressive interventions in Ukraine and the former Soviet Union have a big domestic politics component. Many Ukrainian Canadians are still trying to redo World War II — the war that they lost.”

Nazi collabo families and racist propaganda in the New York Times — “A Russophobic New York Times journalist married to Canada’s powerful Nazi-loving Deputy Prime Minister? It was a match made in heaven!”

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

UPDATE: Listen to the full interview here.

I just recorded an interview with Alex Boykowich, who was one of the Ukrainian Canadians responsible for surfacing information about Chrystia Freeland’s Nazi collaborator grandfather a few years ago when he stumbled onto it in the archives.

Chrystia Freeland, is of course, Canada’s deputy prime minister. And as it turns out, she has spent most of her career — first as a journalist, then as Canada’s powerful Foreign Minister, and now as as Deputy Prime Minister — praising her grandfather’s legacy and whitewashing his past.

Alex’s find caused a minor political scandal in Canada, which was immediately blamed on Putin and Russian disinformation.

I’ll be publishing the full interview soon — the first in what’ll be an ongoing Immigrants as a Weapon podcast/interview series.

Meanwhile, here’s a tiny preview. In it Alex reads from an editorial published in a Nazi newspaper run by Chrystia’s grandpa that rants about “Satan,” the “International Kingdom of Judah,” and the Jews’ appetite for innocent Christian blood.

What are weaponized nationalists for — if not for ranting about Jews and Satan?

—Yasha Levine

PS: If you haven’t already, read my previous letters on Chrystia Freeland’s Nazi family past and why it matters today.

Chrystia Freeland and Canadian Nazi collabos — “Canada’s aggressive interventions in Ukraine and the former Soviet Union have a big domestic politics component. Many Ukrainian Canadians are still trying to redo World War II — the war that they lost.”

Nazi collabo families and racist propaganda in the New York Times — “A Russophobic New York Times journalist married to Canada’s powerful Nazi-loving Deputy Prime Minister? It was a match made in heaven!”

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