NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit yasha.substack.com

We got tired of our basement and recorded this ep outside on the eastern bank of the Hudson. We tried to clean up the audio as much as possible. But with our headphone mics, chirping insects, trains, and lurking tourists we could only do so much.

—The Russians

A transcript is now available to paid subscribers. Listen to previous episodes.

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 history to the liberalism of the 1990s and all the way to the present war. Along the way we talk about why Putin now identifies as a White Russian, what Russian liberals mean when they talk about “the natural course of history,” and why Alexei Navalny just now — while in prison — realized that the democrats and liberal reformers and privatizers of the 1990s were bad.

The jumping off point for our talk was a recent article by Artemy — “Perestroika in the Soviet Union: Triumph of Democracy or a Conservative Revolution?” The article is based his book Negative Revolution, which you can also read in English.

—The Russians

Want to know more? Listen to other eps…

* Russians Against Politics

* “Navalny,” the documentary

* Prigozhin vs Putin

* History's Revenge

* Russians against the war

* “Operation Z”

Photo source: Radek Issue #1.

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 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 everyone to sue everyone else in Los Angeles. In the second half, we talk about Evgeny Prigozhin and the war lord’s little-known film production side hustle: making propaganda films about his mercenaries in action.

Tobin Auber has long worked as a translator in the Russian film industry. He’s originally from London but lived in Saint Petersburg for the last 29 years, until Russia’s war in Ukraine. He is currently writing a memoir in Russian and publishing it in audio format. Here is a bit about him and his book in English, and here are the Russian audio/text versions of his ongoing memoir.

—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

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, social media influencers living in parasitic life force sucking symbiosis with their passive online fans…

—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 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 whole new wave of Jews is taking over the region: neo-trad religious types that are creating their own shtetls.

—The Russians

A few notes.

A few books on Jews in America that we like: An Empire of Their Own, which charts how low-class junk peddlers found themselves building Hollywood and controlling the movies. Then there’s one called Followers of the Trail, a book of interviews with people who attended a Jewish communist family camp in the Hudson Valley set up by Jewish workers and which is now a liberal vacation spot stripped of its old radical history. Also, back when Bernie Sanders was still a thing, Yasha wrote about the old Jewish world that used to exist here in New York  — a world that produced Bernie, a politician not very much liked by most American Jews today. Also, the last WYSK has a bit more on the religious trad takeover of Upstate New York.

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

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 reasons for why Putin arrested rightwing monarchist Igor Strelkov. And I talk about the 1999 Russian-French movie East/West and how its cartoonish portrayal of the Soviet Union as nothing but a large prison led to the ideological swing in the other direction — and the current weaponization of Soviet nostalgia by the government in Russia today.

—Evgenia

PS: I mentioned an ep we recorded with filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov. Listen to it here: “History’s Revenge.” After we recorded this ep Boris Kagarlitsky — a Marxist sociologist and activist — was arrested. I think our take on Putin’s ideology explains why it happened pretty well.

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 this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

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 will finally be done this year.

—The Russians

PS: Yasha posted photos from their trip in his previous WYSK.

Sunset beers on the shore of a California dystopia.

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

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, things are back to normal now…normal war.

—The Russians

P.S. Yesterday, after we recorded our ep, Putin released another 5-minute speech that is like a sad stand up routine where he acts like there was no treason, thanks Wagner soldiers and calls them brave patriots, and completely backs off from his threat to persecute the mutineers. Big loser vibes.

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 subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe