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We chat about the trauma of immigration. Yasha likens it to a traumatic brain injury, like a stroke and reminisces about his immigrant circle in San Francisco and why they were so heavily into psychedelics, which was a kind of attempt at self-therapy. Evgenia talks about her own “internal immigrant” experience — and about how Russians who stayed in Russia display the same traumatic cultural symptoms as those that left. It all has to do with the denial of their Soviet past. As a way of getting into this topic we talk about the Soviet immigrant music festival that we crashed this weekend in the Catskills, where we camped out with our daughter surrounded by huge speakers blasting techno music until five in the morning.

—The Russians