NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS

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 it as quality uplifting family entertainment.

—Yasha

PS: One thing that seems a bit ridiculous about Malm — the guy who inspired this pro-terrorism film — is that as far as I can tell he believes that green tech will save us from climate catastrophe. So terrorism against fossil capitalism...to be replaced with utopian lithium battery state-backed capitalism? And he’s a Marxist, too. A true chin-scratcher, I have to admit.

Want to know more? Check out these other episodes:

* The Jetsonian Left w/Anthony Galluzzo

* The Politics of Technology w/Joe Costello

* Christmas Special

* …and the rest of our archive.

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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 billions hooking Americans on pills. Elite barbarity. I guess that’s the topic of this ep.

—Yasha

A couple of notes.

Early on we talk about an intercepted phone call between a big Russian music producer and a former Russian billionaire Senator in which the two criticize Putin and his war effort from an elite Russian insider perspective. You can read a translated transcript of the call. We talked about Laura Poitras and her previous documentaries in our last episode — the one about Julian Assange. Listen to it here: Triple Threat: Three films about Julian Assange.

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 Chernobyl Guide to the Future. They also talk about popular fictional portrayals of the disaster, including the HBO series Chernobyl, and about how they stack up against what actually happened. The ep was originally broadcast on March 20, 2020.

Filmsuck is still going strong — rebooted with Eileen Jones and her new cohost Dolores McElroy. Check them out and subscribe!

—Yasha Levine

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

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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 now under Biden. Oh how things change!

To add some context to the film, we watched and discuss two other Julian Assange docs: Laura Poitras’ Risk and Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets. They amount to a decade’s worth of documentaries about Wikileaks — chronicling the increasing repression and marginalization and hopelessness of Julian and his project to change the world by freeing information.

—Yasha and Evgenia

A couple of notes on our discussion.

The three films are all very different. Of the three, Risk is probably the most interesting to watch but also the most deceptive and least informative. It gives viewers a false sense of intimacy and reality, while on the backend being very manipulative.

As we discus in the ep, most viewers probably won’t know that after Risk premiered at Cannes — and after Laura Poitras appeared and hugged on the red carpet with Wikileaks sidekick Jacob Appelbaum — Poitras re-edited the film, changing the narrative to show Julian Assange and Jacob Appelbaum not as heroes but as predators. Yasha first found out about this sneaky re-edit from Julian back in 2017 when Julian was still holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy. Julian felt betrayed and explained the re-editing of the film as Laura’s attempt to protect her reputation from a couple of things that happened not long after the film had its premier in France. One was that Jacob Appelbaum — the Tor Project frontman with whom Laura was intimately involved with — was accused of being a sexual predator and was then cancelled by the privacy community. The second was that Julian became fully toxic in liberal circles during the 2016 presidential election: he was seen as a Russian asset who backed Trump over Hillary and released all those damaging emails.

So as Julian explained: because of all of this Poitras had to betray her two friends — one of whom was in captivity, the other who used to be her lover — to make sure she came out of these scandals clean, even though she had no problem with any of this until it became public and a problem for her career. It was a tangled, gross situation.

“I think it’s mostly defensive. She’s the daughter of a billionaire, and has an apartment in Tribecca, Manhattan,” Julian wrote to Yasha back then. “But she’s pretty simple. She aspires to maximise her status among the Tribecca/Greenwich Village, etc. set.”

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 seems to be working very well politically for him. We also talk about how it’s much the same on the American side. Ukraine has become a stand-in for freedom, liberty, democracy. So in the end both sides present this as a civilizational conflict, rather than an old school big power fights over territory and influence. Meanwhile, capitalism and industrialism grind along in the background…

—Yasha

A couple of notes.

Evgenia talked about an interview that Greg Yudin did with Meduza where he praised Lenin’s thinking about imperialism and was mocked by Russian liberals for it. We also mentioned Stephen Kotkin’s interview with the New Yorker about how he thinks the war will end, in which he basically lays out the elite American view on the war: It has been good for “us.” It has brought the West together, shored up our ideals. We also talked about the essay Evgenia wrote a few months after the invasion. Check it out: Welcome to the "RuZZkiy Mir”…

Looking back on the last year, I realize we recorded a lot episodes on this shitty war — and the history and politics surrounding it.

* Putin's Grievance Speech...and, f**k this war.

* “Operation Z”

* Russians against the war

* A Ukrainian refugee in Tijuana

* History's Revenge

* Problematic Russians

* Old pogroms and current events

* A couple of White Russians

* Red-washing the war

* In Russia

* Escape from Russia

* Talking about Putin’s referendum speech while sick with Covid

* Eurasian trip debriefing, war talk and a review of "Triangle of Sadness"

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

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 Evgenia

PS: We reference an interview Max did with the Untranslated blog. Check it out here.

Want to know more? We recorded a few eps on Russian culture and lit…

* Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva w/Thierry Marignac

* All the Sad Soviet Immigrant Lit

* Anti-Soviet identities in the USSR

* Lenin's flesh (and no blood)

* Watching American movies in the USSR ft. Boris Levine

* …and the rest of the archive.

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 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 from our primitive past and moved on to a more rational age. A lot of people laugh at paganism but Rhyd points out that paganism feels like the most baseline and natural way of thinking about and relating to the world around us.

Check out Rhyd’s Being Pagan, a unique book that melds animism with a kind of Marxist materialism. Subscribe to his Substack and check out a course he teaches on paganism.

—Evgenia and Yasha

Want to know more? We recorded a few eps on related topics…

* The Ayahuasca Special

* The Politics of Technology w/Joe Costello

* Mortals of the Earth Unite!

* The Jetsonian Left w/Anthony Galluzzo

* …see the rest of the archive.

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 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 Soviet project he didn’t re-Jewify but stayed true to his Homo Soveticus origins.

—Evgenia

A couple of notes.

We mention a letter about Jewish identity that Sergey wrote to his South African Jewish colleague.

You can check Yasha’s The Soviet Jew book project here. The part of the history that deals with the western campaign to “save” Soviet Jews can be found here. Yasha mentioned Elie Wiesel and his trip to Moscow in the late 1960s, which resulted in a book that describes Soviet Jews as basically being on the brink of annihilation. You can read his write up of that book and the Israeli propaganda campaign that helped produce it.

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

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 Treasury Secretary, and how the American way of silencing journalists can be more sadistic than the Russian way, which is just to kill them.

Happy New Year!

—Yasha Levine

Want to know more? Check out previous episodes of The Russians.

PS: We’ve published a lot of things this year. A lot of has been related to Putin’s cursed invasion of Ukraine. We also did a bunch Soviet and Russian history, things about my own Ukrainian-Jewish family, and Evgenia’s essays on Russian political culture. We’ve also done some great interviews on the politics of technology. Then there’s been the stuff about California water oligarchs and the Pistachios War doc that will be finished in the first half of 2023.

So to close off the year, I figured I’d go along with media tradition and send out a list of the ten or so things that Evgenia and I published this year that I particularly liked. So here’s 2022 in review. The best of a cursed year. In no particular chronological order:

* Christmas Special — Immigration, Capitalism, Trans Politics

* The Ayahuasca Special

* Welcome to the "RuZZkiy Mir" by Evgenia Kovda

* “Operation Z”

* My Ukrainian grandma and our lost history of pogroms by Yasha Levine

* The Jetsonian Left w/Anthony Galluzzo

* Escape from Russia

* The Politics of Technology w/Joe Costello

* Philip K. Dick’s fiction is our nonfiction by Evgenia Kovda

* The Holodomor and the erasure of Jewish victims by Yasha Levine

* Lenin's flesh (and no blood)

* Private islands, forgotten California oligarchs, and Jewish converts. Say hello to our ruling class. by Yasha Levine

* …and then there’s all the rest in our archive.

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

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 another shot at getting their careers back on track. And many of them did succeed, including Dave Anthony and Marc Maron. And now the youngsters took over the medium and use it as a jumping board to mainstream show business.

—Yasha & Evgenia

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