NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS

Evgenia at the LA River.

We’re about to become parents so this ep has serious breeder energy. We start off by talking about Evgenia’s recent great essay on “procreation horror” and then we move on, riffing on things like fertility under neoliberalism, Soviet bourgeois family life, dogs as baby replacements, and having children as a consumer choice.

—Yasha Levine

Notes: Evgenia mentioned Natalya Baranskaya, who wrote stories about what life was like for women in the Soviet Union. She also mentioned Eternal Eve, a history of gynecology.

Check out our previous episodes…and subscribe:

* Episode #0: The Ukrainian-Canadian left & Chrystia Freeland's Nazi grandpa

* Episode #1: Russians Against Politics

* Episode #2: All the Sad Soviet Immigrant Lit

* Episode #3: Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva w/Thierry Marignac

* Episode #4: Palestine and Soviet Jews

* Episode #5: The Serf aka Холоп

* Episode #6: Navalny, the Kremlin, and the curse of neoliberalism

* Episode #7: Adam Curtis, get out of my head

Intro song: American Boy by Комбинация.

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 ep we talk about Adam Curtis and our lack of excitement about his latest doc series, and how it’s gotten to the point that the promotional interviews he does are better than the films he’s promoting. Has Curtis gotten boring and repetitive, or are we so overwhelmed with information that his hypnotic propaganda style has lost its potency?

Towards the end Evgenia introduces the concept of “senilism” — an art idea developed by a Soviet artist after he moved to America. It’s perfect for our decaying empire and its stagnant capitalist realism. Embrace senility!

Missed our previous episodes? 

* Episode #0: The Ukrainian-Canadian left & Chrystia Freeland's Nazi grandpa

* Episode #1: Russians Against Politics

* Episode #2: All the Sad Soviet Immigrant Lit

* Episode #3: Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva w/Thierry Marignac

* Episode #4: Palestine and Soviet Jews

* Episode #5: The Serf aka Холоп

* Episode #6: Navalny, the Kremlin, and the curse of neoliberalism

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

Separated at birth — a young Navalny and a young Yeltsin.

Alexei Navalny — returned from the novichok-dead — is back in Russia, back in jail, and back in the news. Protests have been taking place in cities all across the country with people calling for his release, and it’s pretty clear that the poisoning and the new jail term have only increased Navalny’s cult political status. He’s become an almost mythical figure now, beating death itself in order to save Russia from Vladimir Putin and to lead the Russian people to freedom.

It makes sense that people are getting caught up in the recent life and death drama of the Navalny story. I mean, how can you not. But Evgenia and I talk about something a bit deeper — something’s that’s usually left unsaid in both Russian and western media circles.

What are Navalny politics? And what are the politics of the movement he now leads? Besides being broadly against corruption and opposing Putin’s soft-authoritarian grip on power, what do they actually believe in?

One important point we make is that there is no substantive ideological and political differences between the politics of Putin’s neoliberal clan of oligarchs, bureaucrats, and security goons and those of Navalny’s liberal opposition — an opposition that wants to replace Putin’s rule with itself. Aside form maybe some cultural and clique differences, they’re both various flavors of neoliberalism, or what in the Russian context, you’d call “liberalism.” Evgenia and I have been yelled at online by both Americans and Russians for pointing this out, but it’s true.

One dead giveaway that Navalny’s a neoliberal: he is not against the criminal privatization of the Soviet Union’s industries and resources that happened under Boris Yeltsin — a process that not only created Russia’s corrupt oligarchical political system but also put Putin into power. As surprising as it may seem for all his talk about corruption, Navalny is not against oligarchs as a class. He praises “good” oligarchs — especially western oligarchs — like he does with Warren Buffet and Bill Gates in his viral Putin’s Place doc. From what we can tell, Navalny is only against bad Russian oligarchs — Putin’s oligarchs — because they made money through corruption.

To Navalny, what makes Putin’s oligarchs bad is that they’re not like Bill Gates, one of the richest people on the planet who has his own “Gates Palace” rivaling Putin’s.

Another point we make is that Navalny’s cultural and political positions — not just just his deep neoliberalism, but his nationalism and his racism against people from Central Asia and the Caucuses and the antisemitic and homophobic outbursts he was prone to when he wasn’t as famous as he is now — are inline with the Russian mainstream. They are also very much in line with the politics of his most important base of support: Russia’s entrepreneurial and professional class — starting with the petite bourgeoise and reaching all the way into the lower levels of the oligarchy. In short, he’s very much a man of his time and place.

Anyway, take a listen…

…the full episode is only available to full subscribers. Support our work, subscribe.

—Yasha Levine

Missed our previous episodes? 

* Episode #0: The Ukrainian-Canadian left & Chrystia Freeland's Nazi grandpa

* Episode #1: Russians Against Politics

* Episode #2: All the Sad Soviet Immigrant Lit

* Episode #3: Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva w/Thierry Marignac

* Episode #4: Palestine and Soviet Jews

* Episode #5: The Serf aka Холоп

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, Evgenia and I talk about the newest Russian film sensation: Serf — a comedy of the Russian oligarchy, by the Russian oligarchy.

It’s a truly funny film and it says a lot more about Russian politics and culture today than its director and screenwriters realize. Russia truly has regressed to the 19th century. Its liberated serfs have become the lords.

—Yasha Levine

PS: The show notes — which include links to some of the things we discuss in the episode — are available only to subscribers and will be published shortly. Here they are. So…subscribe!

Missed our previous episodes?

* Episode #0: The Ukrainian Canadian left & Chrystia Freeland's Nazi grandpa

* Episode #1: Russians Against Politics

* Episode #2: All the Sad Soviet Immigrant Lit

* Episode #3: Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva w/Thierry Marignac

* Episode #4: Palestine and Soviet Jews

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

Eating knafeh in Nablus.

In this episode Evgenia and I talk about a short trip we took to Palestine last year and get into all sorts of related topics — Zionism, the occupation, nationalism, Israel’s weaponization of Soviet and Russian Jewish immigrants, Jews vs. Jew hatred. We also talk about our unexpected and surprising stay at Banksy’s hotel in occupied Bethelham — surprising because we accidentally stumbled onto what might be the only example of effective political art that I’ve seen in my life…in the shape of a cheesy boutique hotel. And I don’t even like Banksy’s art very much.

—Yasha Levine

This is a preview of a full episode that is only available to subscribers. To listen to the rest, sign up here.

A massive door in the occupation wall that runs through Bethelham, which the Israeli army uses to come in for their ops. Notice the remote controlled “skunk” cannon on the left-hand side. People told us Israelis use it to disperse locals by dousing them with a noxious liquid.

A security tower overlooking the Aida refugee camp in Bethelham.

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

Eating knafeh in Nablus.

In this episode Evgenia and I talk about a short trip we took to Palestine last year and get into all sorts of related topics — Zionism, the occupation, nationalism, Israel’s weaponization of Soviet and Russian Jewish immigrants, Jews vs. Jew hatred. We also talk about our unexpected and surprising stay at Banksy’s hotel in occupied Bethelham — surprising because we accidentally stumbled onto what might be the only example of effective political art that I’ve seen in my life…in the shape of a cheesy boutique hotel. Come for the Banksy art, stay for the anti-Zionist indoctrination and agitprop! It works. And I don’t even like Banksy’s art very much.

—Yasha Levine

PS: One thing I wanted to talk about was my own personal experience with a flash of anti-Soviet/Russian racism in Israel when I was 16. I didn’t get a chance to, so I’ll write it up in a newsletter soon. [UPDATE: here it is.]

And since we talk quite a bit about Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel in Bethelham — which overlooks a chunk of the occupation wall that runs right through the city — I figured you might want to see what it and the area around it looks like.

The view from our hotel room.

Same view at night.

The Wall

A massive door in the occupation wall that runs through Bethelham, which the Israeli army uses to come in for their ops. Notice the remote controlled “skunk” cannon on the left-hand side. It’s used to disperse people by dousing them with a noxious liquid.

A close up of the skunk cannon.

A security tower overlooking the Aida refugee camp in Bethelham.

A portion of the wall that runs right through a Palestinian cemetery.

Evgenia and Banksy art in the lobby.

Heading north on a road just outside of Jerusalem.

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

Eduard and Natalia in Paris, 1989.

In our last episode Evgenia and I talked about the sad state of Soviet immigrant literature produced today. In this episode we look on the bright side: we talk to French cult author Thierry Marignac about the bigger-than-life lives of his friends Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva, who — among other things — together produced the best literature of the third wave of Soviet immigration.

Eduard — a novelist and the infamous founder of the avant-garde National-Bolshevik Party — passed away earlier this year. Natalia died in 2003. A singer and a model who was married for a long time to Eduard Limonov when they lived in Paris, she is not well known as an author — but her novel and her short stories about her immigrant experience and her short modeling career in 1970s Los Angeles (she was on the first album of the Cars) are incredibly funny and dark. I think she wrote the best Soviet immigrant lit there is. Sadly none of it translated into English so we can’t share it with you.

—Yasha Levine

This is a preview of a full episode that is only available to subscribers. To listen to the rest, sign up here.

Thierry and his girlfriend in Paris, 1985.

Natalia on the cover of the first Cars album, 1978.

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’re about three months late but Evgenia and I finally did it: we recorded episode #2 of our Immigrants as a Weapon podcast. This one’s important — a topic we talk and complain about a lot in our household: the utterly sad and pathetic state of Soviet immigrant literature that’s being produced today. 

Pretty much every generation of Soviet and Russian immigrants — going back to the Russian Revolution and all the way through the dissident and Jewish immigration waves of the 1970s and 1980s — had produced at least some worthwhile literature and at least a few notable writers. But that’s not true of the generation of Soviet immigrants working today.

We discuss the most celebrated and well-known of these authors, including people like Gary Shteyngart, Peter Pomerantsev, and the Gessen clan — Masha and Keith. And we try to figure out why today’s Soviet immigrant lit is so bland and forgettable.

This is a preview of a full podcast episode that is only available to subscribers. To get listen to the rest, sign up here. Perks include your own podcast RSS feed.

—Yasha Levine and Evgenia Kovda

PS: Listen to our first episode — “Russians Against Politics” — where we talk about the neoliberalism that pervades the post-Soviet world and Russians’ rabid response to Black Lives Matter. And…subscribe!

Intro song: American Boy by Комбинация.

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, Evgenia Kovda takes over and we talk about something that might come as a surprise to a lot of people. It’s the rabid pro-police reaction of most Russians in Russia (and abroad) to the Black Lives Matter protests taking place in America.

While CNN and the New York Times run segments that blame “the Russians” for using the protests to destabilize America, in Russia the exact opposite is taking place: The Russian government — and most of Russian society — is firmly against the protests. Russian society stands with the police. It stands in solidarity with America’s political establishment.

There are two main parts to the episode.

In the first hour, we get into the details of how these protests are depicted in the Russian media. What we see is that there is no real difference between the Kremlin and the liberal opposition. They’re both united in their hatred and condemnation.

But we really get warmed up and going in the second hour, when we try to figure out why Russian society is so united against these protests. It’s a complicated question. But on a bigger more conceptual level, we think it has to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the total negation of the Russian Revolution that followed it.

—Yasha Levine

PS: Subscribe!

Recorded on June 16, 2020.

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

Somewhere in Nazi-occupied Ukraine during WWII. From the personal files of Chrystia Freeland’s grandpa, Michael Chomiak. Courtesy of Alex Boykowich.

For the first episode of Immigrants as a Weapon Radio, I talk to Alex Boykowich, who is one of the people responsible for surfacing information about Chrystia Freeland’s Nazi collaborator grandfather a few years ago.

If you don’t know, Chrystia Freeland is Canada’s deputy prime minister. She has spent most of her career — first as a journalist, then as Canada’s powerful Foreign Minister, and now as as Deputy Prime Minister — praising her grandfather’s legacy and whitewashing his past. Alex’s find caused a minor political scandal in Canada — which was immediately blamed on Putin and Russian disinformation.

But it definitely wasn’t Russian disinfo. Among other things, her grandpa ran a Ukrainian-language newspaper out of Nazi-occupied Krakow, Poland — a paper that praised Hitler, ran giant ads for Ukrainian SS recruitment, spread antisemitic propaganda, and pumped out vile garbage that helped justify the mass slaughter of Jews, Poles and Russians. The story was first reported by John Helmer and Telesur — based on information that Alex dug up in the archives.

We talk about a bunch of things beyond just Chrystia Freeland and her Nazi collaborator grandpa. Among them, Alex gets into the little-known, sordid history of how Canada’s Ukrainian fascist-right waged a war against Canada’s much older and much larger Ukrainian left and progressive community — and did so with the full backing of the Canadian state. In short: Canada loves its Nazi collaborators!

—Yasha Levine

PS: If you haven’t already, read my previous letters on Chrystia Freeland’s Nazi family past and why it matters today:

* Chrystia Freeland and Canadian Nazi collabos — “Canada’s aggressive interventions in Ukraine and the former Soviet Union have a big domestic politics component. Many Ukrainian Canadians are still trying to redo World War II — the war that they lost.”

* Nazi collabo families and racist propaganda in the New York Times — “A Russophobic New York Times journalist married to Canada’s powerful Nazi-loving Deputy Prime Minister? It was a match made in heaven!”

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