The Russians

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit yasha.substack.comWe 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.—YashaWant 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.comThis 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 EvgeniaPS: 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.—YashaPS: One thing that seems a bit ridiculous about Malm — the guy who inspired this pro-terrorism film — is that as far as I can tell he believes that green tech will save us from climate catastrophe. So terrorism against fossil capitalism...to be replaced with utopian lithium battery state-backed capitalism? And he's a Marxist, too. A true chin-scratcher, I have to admit. 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.comWe'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.—YashaA 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 LevineWant 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.comWe 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 EvgeniaA 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…—YashaA 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 EvgeniaPS: 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.comThis 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 YashaWant 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.—EvgeniaA 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 LevineWant 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 & EvgeniaWant 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 & EvgeniaPS: 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

Evgenia and I talk about TraumaZone, Adam Curtis' latest doc series. It's about seven hours long and tries to tell the story of the twin destructions that took place in Russia: the destruction of communism and the destruction of democracy.Despite a lot of simplifications and its Anglo-Saxon misery porn fetish, Evgenia thinks it's a valuable historical document and it could only have been made by an outsider, precisely because of how traumatic that decade was for ex-Soviets. Even today few people there want to think about happened, let alone alone to dig into the archives and construct a clear narrative about those times. The entire population suffers from PTSD.—Yasha LevineA couple of notes.Evgenia mentions a documentary that Paweł Pawlikowski made about Vladimir Zhirinovsky. She wrote about the film a while back — check it out. Evgenia also mentions a couple of documentaries by Johnson & Johnson heir Jamie Johnson: Born Rich and the The One Percent. As Evgenia says, they stand out because documentaries are as a general rule made by the rich about the poor. But Johnson, fresh out college, made a couple of docs about his own oligarchic class — his family and friends, even Ivanka Trump is in there — and that's very unusual. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 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 KovdaP.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.—YashaPS: 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.comIn 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 LevineA 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 LevinePS: 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

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 LevineOne 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 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 LevineThis 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 LevineWant 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 LevineWant 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 LevineWant 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. 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 LevineHaving 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 LevineA 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

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 LevineWant 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

Listen now | 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, “ This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at 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. Get access to private episodes at yasha.substack.com/subscribe

Listen now (90 min) | 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. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at 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. Get access to private episodes at yasha.substack.com/subscribe

Listen now | 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. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yasha.substack.com/subscribe

Listen now | Thousand 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. Anna is currently in Istanbul and among Russians who have fled. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yasha.substack.com/subscribe

Listen now | A week into Putin’s disastrous regime change war, Evgenia and I sit down to talk about our thoughts on what’s happening and about what we’re hearing about 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 Russian people.” On the other, a lot of Russians are shocked and totally terrified by what’s happening, and many are fleeing as best they can to wherever they can — Georgia, Azerbaijan, Israel, Turkey, European countries. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at 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 LevineThis 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 documentaryThe Ayahuasca SpecialChristmas Special: Ghost of EpsteinSt. Paul of AmsterdamImmigrant Deprogramming with Nika DubrovskyImaginary Futures with Richard BarbrookBehind the Silicon CurtainThe 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 LevineAnti-Soviet identities in the USSRThe EndBreedersAdam Curtis, get out of my headNavalny, the Kremlin, and the curse of neoliberalism This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yasha.substack.com/subscribe

Listen now | 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. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at 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 LevineCatch up on some old eps: “Navalny,” the documentaryThe Ayahuasca SpecialChristmas Special: Ghost of EpsteinSt. Paul of AmsterdamImmigrant Deprogramming with Nika DubrovskyImaginary Futures with Richard BarbrookBehind the Silicon CurtainThe 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 LevineAnti-Soviet identities in the USSRThe EndBreedersAdam Curtis, get out of my headNavalny, the Kremlin, and the curse of neoliberalism This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at 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 LevineThis 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. Get access to private episodes at yasha.substack.com/subscribe

Listen now | 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 public episode. Get access to private episodes at yasha.substack.com/subscribe

Listen now (31 min) | 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!” This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at 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 YashaListen to our previous episodes:Episode #17: Immigrant Deprogramming with Nika DubrovskyEpisode #16: Imaginary Futures with Richard BarbrookEpisode #15: Behind the Silicon CurtainEpisode #14: The Soviet Jew & good riddance Los FelizEpisode #13: Immigrant Deprogramming with Anna/АняEpisode #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. Get access to private episodes at yasha.substack.com/subscribe

Listen now | 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 public episode. Get access to private episodes at yasha.substack.com/subscribe

Listen now (120 min) | 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. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yasha.substack.com/subscribe

Listen now (6 min) | 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. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yasha.substack.com/subscribe

Listen now | We record our last ep from our pandemic baby nest. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yasha.substack.com/subscribe

Listen now (5 min) | 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. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at 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 LevineThis 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 USSREpisode #9: The EndEpisode #8: BreedersEpisode #7: Adam Curtis, get out of my headEpisode #6: Navalny, the Kremlin, and the curse of neoliberalismEpisode #5: The Serf aka ХолопEpisode #4: Palestine and Soviet JewsEpisode #3: Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva w/Thierry MarignacEpisode #2: All the Sad Soviet Immigrant LitEpisode #1: Russians Against PoliticsEpisode #0: The Ukrainian-Canadian left & Chrystia Freeland's Nazi grandpa This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yasha.substack.com/subscribe

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. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at 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 public episode. Get access to private episodes at yasha.substack.com/subscribe