NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS

We talk to poet and stand-up comedian Joshua Turek about today’s cultural and political crisis and ways to deal with it. We get into Joshua’s journey from child actor to screenwriter to TikTok star and his escape from LA, and wonder how to use this evil internet as a force for good. —Evgenia You can get Joshua’s poetry book directly from him here . He’s got an American comedy tour this summer, so...

We talk to our friend Joe Costello about Trump’s tariffs, democracy, deindustrialization, the Yeltsinification of America, and the innate human desire for a communal life… We discuss globalization, why being against it has been such a political taboo until Trump, and why these tariffs will probably ultimately fail. We are not the 1950s anymore, when America was the sole industrial world power. Thi...

People compare Trump to Hitler or to Putin. But for us the closest historical comparison is Boris Yeltsin. So today we talk to Jacob Silverman about Trump’s shitcoins and other crypto schemes because they remind us so much of 1990s Russia and Yeltsin’s family corrupt deals. Back then in Russia, like with America today, corruption and looting happened right out in the open, with regular people scam...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com Evgenia and I talk to Will Menaker about the left-right whiplash of the post-Bernie years. Nihilism, idealism, optimism, the politics of winning, the cultural unity of America’s bipartisan politics, a psychoanalysis of the American beta-bully mindset…we discuss it all. Take a listen! —Yasha Come to our AGAINST...

We talk with Alexander Melamid , the most famous Soviet-American artist of his generation. He moved to NYC in late 1970s after being an underground artist in Moscow for a decade — part of the creative duo Komar & Melamid. He was a success in the NY art world overnight and knew Warhol and everyone who is anyone in the art scene back in the day. Since then he’s lost his optimistic naivete about art...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com We talk to our friend Mark Ames about nihilism, cynicism, culture wars, Red Scare, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Russia of the 1990s, and the vibe shifts of America’s political culture — from punk to the podcasts of today. —Yasha Want to know more? Read Evgenia’s hit essay “ Against Nihilism ” and listen to our...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com We recorded this in bed over a week ago while we were in Miami — mostly for our ourselves…to talk through some ideas and concepts. We weren’t going to release it. But I gave it a listen and I thought we had a great conversation — genuine pillow talk before going to bed. Some of the things we discuss: the start...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com We record an emergency ep to talk about Sean Baker’s sweep at the Oscars with his new film Anora . We talk about Sean Baker’s sentimental style and his “changemaker” interest in stories of marginalized people. He comes from good New Jersey suburb but the only layer of American society he’s interested in are t...

We continue our discussion of Red Scare’s turn into a real red scare platform. We have been doing deconstruction of their rhetoric on Twitter the past week, which has been going viral and has been drawing all the nastiness and poison of the Red Scare universe to the surface for everyone to see. And we’ve come to a very grim conclusion about the nature of this podcast project, and it’s this: What R...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com We talk about my recent epiphany that the scary and volatile world of Russia that I grew up in post-collapse in the 1990s might be the future of America, rather than a distant, embarrassing past that I used to think was irrelevant to my new life here. Turns out I’m a time traveler of sorts. I am from your futur...

We talk about the rise and fall of Red Scare, America’s once-coolest Soviet immigrant podcast. They lost their edge. We’re #1 now. Want to know more? * The Secret Power of Lex Fridman * Konstantin Kisin's KGB Konnektions * …other eps —  and subscribe ! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/sub...

We talk to playwright and theatre director Matthew Gasda about his plays, his theatre company Brooklyn Centre for Theatre Research, and the zeitgeist of the post-COVID downtown New York scene. We talk about how theater is a peculiar art form for a millennial to be engaged with, as it is completely offline and intentionally unrecorded, un-televised, and impossible to make viral on social media. In...

Artist and author (and mother) Nika Dubrovsky is back on the show to talk about Soviet cartoons and Soviet literature for kids and the unique radical progressive ethos children’s culture had in post-revolutionary Soviet society. We talk about the utopian book series Dunno , about poems by Marshak and Chukovsky, who is considered the Russian Dr. Seuss , and we compare them to the American publishin...

We continue our journey through the weaponized immigrant podcaster universe — this time with Konstantin Kisin. Konstantin, a hack comedian turned political podcaster, is a classic weaponized immigrant — or a “court Russian,” as Evgenia calls it. He embodies all the tropes of one: gross subservience to “Western civilization,” trafficking in stereotypes about the savage totalitarianism of Russian so...

Evgenia and I sit down in the attic to talk about David Lynch’s passing, my failed attempt to make a Lynch film in my early 20s, and the similarities between Lynch and Philip K. Dick. We also talk about the end of California and how America’s vibe has shifted east to Florida and Miami — a full-speed-ahead death drive into the abyss with gaudy partying and conspicuous consumption. We also talk abou...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com We talk about the fires in Los Angeles, Evgenia’s precog abilities that stopped us from moving back there, the similarities between me and Roman Polanski, and my reporting on the billionaire farmers and old oligarchic land speculators that built LA and California. And of course water — we talk about water. —Yas...

We dissect the phenomenon of Lex Fridman, America’s newest and biggest court Russian, who leaves Masha Gessen in the dust. As fellow Russian immigrants we get Lex like no one else in the English speaking world. We think we cracked the secret to his success. We think we know what stands behind his sudden rise to fame and fortune. Without doing a big reveal here (you’ll have to listen to the ep for...

Happy Near Year! We start off 2025 with this episode — recorded today in Turin. We talk about Yasha’s pneumonia, the struggles and insights we had in 2024, and the things we wish for 2025. The spiritual death of suburbia, the priesthood of filmmaking, morality and genocide, power and god, the great immigrant battle that’s engulfing America…we cover it all in one go. —The Russians Kovda and Gogol i...

We talk to Pavel Khazanov about the delusional ideations of the generation that ended the Soviet Union…children of serfs who began to identify themselves with Russia’s old nobility. Pavel is a professor at Rutgers . He recently wrote a book that inspired our talk: The Russia That We Have Lost: Pre-Soviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse . A lot of our eps are for paying subscribers. Join the lying fl...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com We have a nice morning conversation. We talk about Yasha’s blossoming music career (and our plans to start a band). We discuss Evgenia’s attendance of a screening of From Ground Zero, an anthology of short films shot in Gaza this year that’ll be competing in the Oscars. We talk about the blurry lines between fi...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com On the eve of my birthday we talk about the final disillusionment I had with American culture after joining the middle class suburban normie wife life and felt like I had been teleported to a different planet, a planet just for breeders. We also talk about the outliers of whom there are plenty in our generation...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com We broadcast to you from bed, barely awake, to talk about the election — Kamala, Trump, what we’d do if we had to choose between the lib and the MAGA camps…we even manage to get into a fight. So strap in and get ready for some real scenes from a marriage. —Yasha

We get out of bed to talk with Rachel Feldman about messianic zionism and the Temple Movement, which wants to end Judaism as we know it and replace it with an Israelite theocracy in the Holy Land complete with animal sacrifices — to go back more than 2,000 years to before Rome destroyed Jerusalem and ended Jewish rule. We also discuss the core of Rachel’s research: Noahidism, a new global religion...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com In this bonus ep for subscribers we lie flat in bed late at night on the edge of sleep as Evgenia talks about seeing Paul Schrader present his latest film — Oh, Canada — at the Woodstock Film Festival. We also discuss the upscale boomers of the Hudson Valley, Yasha’s anti-rabbi TikTok optimization, Jewish ident...

Late at night in bed we talk about Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed new film. Unlike most people out there, we were impressed and touched by it. Coppola dissects American society and its media propaganda machine only the way foreigners usually managed to do in the past — people like Paul Verhoeven with Starship Troopers and Robocop or Neil Blomkamp with Elysium . Maybe that’s why...