NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS

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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

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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.

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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.

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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 American children’s books and what’s different about the communist-era Czech hit cartoon “The mole” and the iconic Soviet kid’s book “Uncle Fyodor.”

—Evgenia

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 about Philip K Dick’s book Clans of the Alphane Moon, where he perfectly captures our society through a mental illness metaphor. We also praise Richard Gere for his role as a homeless man in Time Out of Mind, and Yasha shares insights he got form playing a homeless man in my short film Changemaker.

— Evgenia

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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 find out where James Franco found “inspiration” for his Palo Alto: Stories book.

— Evgenia and Yasha

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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 procreation, medieval-style peasant nuclear families built on solemn duty…it’s all there in her imagined utopia.

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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, we realized that Zardoz perfectly predicts the Silicon Valley of today: a sterile techno-utopia built on global exploitation, a place where people want to live forever and where no one’s f*****g or having fun. In the ep we go over all sorts of things: the politics of technology, degrowth, the Enlightenment, post-leftism, Prometheanism, Soviet cosmism, and the difficulty in getting people interested in de-consumerized and de-industrialized political alternatives today.

We last had Anthony on in August 2022 about what he’s termed “the Jetson left.”

He is a lecturer at the New School. His focus is on early American and Romantic literature. You can follow him on Twitter and read some of his work here and here and here.

—Yasha

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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

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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 of 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