NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com We talk to Noah Kulwin of the Blowback pod about growing up among liberal American Zionists, his time in Israel, and why he didn’t do aliah or join the IDF — but instead got radicalized and joined the Jewish resistance. The central question we try to get at is: Why do some Jews get lured into Zionism and others...

We start off by talking about how Adam Curtis often says that the era of individualism is coming to an end and wonder whether nationalism will be one of the ideas that takes over more and more. We then move on to Israel and Jewish nationalism and discuss the growth of Zionism both here in America and Russia. The growth of Jewish nationalism among American Jews can definitely be seen as response to...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com We have filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov back on the show to talk about his experience being Andrei Tarkovsky’s assistant on the set of Sacrifice, Tarkovsky’s last film. We discuss the dismal state of culture in Russia after the fall of the USSR, the provincial state of mind of today’s Russian intelligentsia, and the...

We talk about the media reaction to Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians and the zionist victim complex that allows people to rationalize any violence as self-defense. We wonder if what we are witnessing is the crisis of zionism or the solidification of zionist fervor — or maybe both happening at once. We also talk about how the term “zionism” obscures more than it explains. Zionism isn’t somethin...

We didn’t want to add to the noise of emergency broadcasting after the October 7th Hamas attack. But we've been doomscrolling the news and have been shocked by the rhetoric that has surfaced in the aftermath, so we’re pitching in. We talk about the context of what happened, the genocidal response of Russian liberals, the absurdity of equating Israel with Ukraine as victims of savage aggression…and...

We talk to Katie Halper about the re-release of Commie Camp, her 2013 documentary about a Jewish socialist children’s camp in upstate New York that multiple generations of her family went to: her, her mother, her mother’s mother… In its early decades it was basically part of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party. Aside from the doc, we chat about our own Soviet/post-Soviet summer camp experiences,...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com We are finally back and we talk about my film scouting trip to Estonia, Russian Estonians, the inherited Soviet conflict that have never been resolved… we also chat about the most successful Russian Jewish immigrant to America — Ayn Rand.

When people think about Perestroika in the USSR the general sense most have is that it was a liberal and democratic movement. We talk to Russian political philosopher Artemy Magun about how it was actually something else: a conservative revolution — and that the foundation for the hard conservative turn of Russian elites under Putin today was laid back then. We cover a lot of ground — from Soviet...

We talk about Russian films and the hierarchical world of Russia’s intelligentsia with Tobin Auber, an honorary Russian. In the first half, we talk about his experience with Michael Biehn (famous for The Terminator and Aliens ) during the shooting of Aleksei Balabanov’s The American . The film was never completed because Biehn almost drank himself to death on location in Siberia, prompting everyon...

This week we talk to Jordan Castro about The Novelist, his debut novel. It’s the only book we’ve seen that comes close to conveying the lived experience of being on the Internet. In a way the book complements Yasha’s Surveillance Valley — describing in spirit the fake world that our military-industrial tech overlords trapped us all in. We discuss a bunch of things: God, PKD, addiction, writing, so...

We can as well rename the podcast to “The Jews,” since we can’t stop talking about them. This week we first talk about the country life and our utter incompetence at it. Then we go on and on about the Jews — mostly the ones in the Catskills, where New York Jews used to spend their summers in their own little vacation ghettos until the 1970s when they became “white” and joined the mainstream. Now a...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com We finally come out of the haze of our move and record an episode in our new underground studio — next to a newly installed radon gas pipe. We cover this week’s current events and talk about the latest development in Israel — and some of the similarities between Israel and Russia. We also talk about the deeper...

This is another audiobook installment of my ongoing book The Soviet Jew . Part One of Chapter One: Kidnapping on the Moscow Express . It’s starts out by telling the story of how one Palestinian group came to believe that Israel was using Soviet Jewish migration as a weapon against Palestinian nationhood — and tried doing something about it. —Yasha This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss...

We talk about our epic move from San Francisco to the Hudson Valley this week and about cultural curation as a job. We also discuss the phenomenon of How Long Gone and wonder if we might be the Ted Kaczynski of podcasting. —The Russians This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

We talk to our old friend — filmmaker/designer Rowan Wernham — about the trip he and Yasha took to California’s Central Valley, where they got to see a zombie lake, rotting pistachio orchards, and some oligarch farms that got flooded this year. We also talk about Pistachio Wars, the documentary about California’s weird and rapacious planter class that Rowan and Yasha have been shooting, and which...

Better late than never, we talk about the latest crisis in Russia: the head of paramilitary Wagner Group Evgeniy Prigozhin rolling his tanks towards Moscow and then changing his mind in the last minute and retreating to Belarus. In his last communique, Prigozhin published a voice message saying he wasn’t doing a coup or a mutiny — he was just doing “a justice march.” Joke’s on you, Putin! Anyway,...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com I’ll be serially releasing The Soviet Jew in audio format on our pod. Today’s installment is the introductory chapter. More will follow once a week or so. The full audio is for paying subscribers only. —Yasha Want to know more? Check out The Soviet Jew , listen to previous episodes of The Russians and… subscrib...

Our last episode from our Haight-Ashbury living quarters. We talk about the cult of technology, the annoying self-driving cars that have been taking over San Francisco, and we discuss Ted Kaczynski’s work — what he got right, what he got wrong. RIP Ted. Want to know more? Check out previous episodes of The Russians …and subscribe . This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other...

We talk to our old friend Brett Forrest about his new book Lost Son and about the war in Ukraine — which he experienced firsthand as a WSJ journalist stationed in Kiev on the eve of the invasion and reporting from Bucha right after the Russian army retreated from there. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefario...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com First we talk about Compact magazine and it’s promise to go beyond right and left, while sneakily trying to sell organized religion as something new. We also discuss why disaffected liberal feminists and former pickup artists choose Jesus Christ. In the second half, we discuss nuclear family propaganda in Ameri...

We’re leaving San Francisco next month and decided to record an episode about Haight-Ashbury, where we’ve lived for the last year and a half, and about the neighbors we’ve gotten to know here — the local homeless. We’ve developed a strange, maybe parasocial relationship with them — but it’s a relationship that’s still more real than the nonexistent one we have with our housed neighbors. We talk ab...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com We talk to Malcolm Harris, a journalist and author of the new book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World . We discuss why Palo Alto is so powerful and so central to the American Empire, despite its seeming provincialism, and why the concept of The Californian Ideology is bogus. Also we f...

For the first half hour we talk about the Ukrainian war and the attempted assassination of Russian novelist Zakhar Prilepin. Then we move on to our main discussion: Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress. We were hoping to extract something positive out of this thing, instead we got a book so weird and incoherent and badly written it was actually funny. Separation of sexes, joyless procreatio...

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,...

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 . Th...