NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS

We talk about the rise and fall of Red Scare, America’s once-coolest Soviet immigrant podcast. They lost their edge. We’re #1 now.

Want to know more?

* The Secret Power of Lex Fridman

* Konstantin Kisin's KGB Konnektions

* …other eps — 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

We talk to playwright and theatre director Matthew Gasda about his plays, his theatre company Brooklyn Centre for Theatre Research, and the zeitgeist of the post-COVID downtown New York scene. We talk about how theater is a peculiar art form for a millennial to be engaged with, as it is completely offline and intentionally unrecorded, un-televised, and impossible to make viral on social media. In that way, theater points to a future where people abandon virtual reality and want to experience things live…in the flesh.

—IBWR

PS: Doomers, Gasda’s play about the geniuses behind our AI takeover, is playing now.

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

Artist and author (and mother) Nika Dubrovsky is back on the show to talk about Soviet cartoons and Soviet literature for kids and the unique radical progressive ethos children’s culture had in post-revolutionary Soviet society.

We talk about the utopian book series Dunno, about poems by Marshak and Chukovsky, who is considered the Russian Dr. Seuss, and we compare them to the American publishing system that censors interesting and alternative children’s books. Nika tells a fascinating story on how Dr. Seuss found publishing success despite all odds.

Nika is currently working on a book series she cofounded with her late husband David Graeber: Anthropology For Kids, which was inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem “what is good and what is bad.”

—Evgenia

P.S. I had to talk to Nika alone since Yasha couldn’t come down to New York because our daughter was sick. The sound quality is not that great since my mic set up failed and the conversation was recorded on an iPhone. My tech support was not there!

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 continue our journey through the weaponized immigrant podcaster universe — this time with Konstantin Kisin.

Konstantin, a hack comedian turned political podcaster, is a classic weaponized immigrant — or a “court Russian,” as Evgenia calls it. He embodies all the tropes of one: gross subservience to “Western civilization,” trafficking in stereotypes about the savage totalitarianism of Russian society, blaming all the problems in the West on outside forces — particularly Russia and China…

His particular shtick, though, is to placate his Western audience with the notion that they live in the best of all possible societies and that a group of Russian FSB-connected asiatics are plotting to destroy their way of life. How? Through a new type of Marxism called wokeness. That’s how.

What Konstantin doesn’t divulge, though, is that he himself is part of this foreign bacillus injected into the UK with the help of the Russian security state. As we discuss, Konstantin’s fancy schooling in England (and his move to the island) was funded by his Russian bureaucrat-business father, who partook in the pure capitalism of 90s Moscow by embezzling and privatizing public funds while getting cover from the FSB.

—IBWR

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Want to know more?

* Listen to our ep on Lex Fridman

* Yasha’s was on the weaponized immigrant beat a long, long time ago — hence the title of this Substack

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

Evgenia and I sit down in the attic to talk about David Lynch’s passing, my failed attempt to make a Lynch film in my early 20s, and the similarities between Lynch and Philip K. Dick. We also talk about the end of California and how America’s vibe has shifted east to Florida and Miami — a full-speed-ahead death drive into the abyss with gaudy partying and conspicuous consumption. We also talk about influencer culture and how zoomers are probably going to be a very conservative generation, trying to hold onto a 20th-century American status quo that’s quickly slipping away.

—Yasha

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Me and Evgenia sitting in a car, stalking David Lynch’s home last year.

Want to know more? Listen to other eps on LA and California:

* LA fires, billionaire farmers, and the end of the Hollywood dream

* The waning cult of California

* Behind the Silicon Curtain

* The Hollywood System

* LA dystopia

* Catching up

* …and more.

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 talk about the fires in Los Angeles, Evgenia’s precog abilities that stopped us from moving back there, the similarities between me and Roman Polanski, and my reporting on the billionaire farmers and old oligarchic land speculators that built LA and California. And of course water — we talk about water.

—Yasha

PS: Read my essay on the fires and the terraforming-aqueduct system that made the fires and life in Los Angeles possible.

Want to know more? Listen to other eps on LA and California:

* The Hollywood System

* LA dystopia

* Catching up

* St. Francis of Hollywood

* Paul Schrader's Third Act

* October 7, 2024

* …more

We dissect the phenomenon of Lex Fridman, America’s newest and biggest court Russian, who leaves Masha Gessen in the dust.

As fellow Russian immigrants we get Lex like no one else in the English speaking world. We think we cracked the secret to his success. We think we know what stands behind his sudden rise to fame and fortune. Without doing a big reveal here (you’ll have to listen to the ep for that), all I can say is that it rests on the sublimation of his repressed desires. To put it another way, we answer the question why Lex loves to interview rich, powerful, and prominent men and why he’s still very single. What’s this big thing that he is denying himself? Well here’s a hint: it’s all about a four letter word that starts with “d.”

—Evgenia

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

Happy Near Year! We start off 2025 with this episode — recorded today in Turin. We talk about Yasha’s pneumonia, the struggles and insights we had in 2024, and the things we wish for 2025. The spiritual death of suburbia, the priesthood of filmmaking, morality and genocide, power and god, the great immigrant battle that’s engulfing America…we cover it all in one go.

—The Russians

Kovda and Gogol in Rome

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 Pavel Khazanov about the delusional ideations of the generation that ended the Soviet Union…children of serfs who began to identify themselves with Russia’s old nobility.

Pavel is a professor at Rutgers. He recently wrote a book that inspired our talk: The Russia That We Have Lost: Pre-Soviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse.

A lot of our eps are for paying subscribers. Join the lying flat club with us!

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 have a nice morning conversation. We talk about Yasha’s blossoming music career (and our plans to start a band). We discuss Evgenia’s attendance of a screening of From Ground Zero, an anthology of short films shot in Gaza this year that’ll be competing in the Oscars. We talk about the blurry lines between fiction and nonfiction and people’s drive to be creative even in the most bleak situations. Then we trash talk the documentary industry and gossip about the doc-oriented MFA program Evgenia attended that was run by a guy married into the Netanyahu family. We also talk about how immigration gives you cultural super powers…and how it helped Mike Nichols make great comedies. And then Evgenia reminisces about how living in America helped her respect her own culture. There’s more in there…a lot more.

—The Russians

On the ep we mention Evgenia’s thesis film Changemaker. We talked about the two songs I released last month: A Devious God and Murder on the Feed. And From Ground Zero, the film shot in Gaza during the genocide…