NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS

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 o...

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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.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 billi...

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 Che...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.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 no...

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 se...

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...

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...

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 S...

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...

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 anothe...

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 Ame...

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...

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 dest...

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 o...

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 ab...

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-es...

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...

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...

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...

In this episode Evgenia and I talk to Anya Bernstein about Nikolai Fyodorov, Cosmism, and Russian/Soviet anti-death utopias of the industrial age. Me, personally, I’m very much pro-death. But these guys had other ideas. Some wanted to become self-directed gods, under the flag of the Russian Empire and the Russian Orthodox Church. Others first wanted to defeat capitalism and then move on to the nex...

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 t...

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...

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 bei...

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 unhapp...