NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS

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 accid...

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 w...

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 opposi...

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 Freela...

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 car...