NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS

We got out of bed yet again…this time to talk to Miloslav Chemodanov, a Russian journalist now seeking refugee status in New York. He talks about fleeing the war, his experience growing up gay in Russia, about how anti-gay politics are cynically deployed by the government for political control…and a lot more.

A note: We had a slight technical issue with the recording…the issue being that Yasha forgot to press the record button. So we’re missing an early chunk of the interview but it’s great anyway. So check it out!

PS: You can follow Miloslav on Instagram. And read about him here…

PPS: We talk about Evgenia interviewing Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey. Here’s the link.

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We get out of bed to talk to Corey Robin about the evolution of Jewish politics in the United States and how this politics has regressed to an older European model. The Jewish mainstream now only looks out for its own narrow interests, working through centralized orgs to lobby for protection and has moved away from the egalitarianism that marked its politics before. Someone like Hannah Arendt would probably say it’s a return to a court jew-type approach…and it’s not something that’s good for Jews.

We also talk about President Biden’s unsettling statements that he can’t guarantee safety for Jews in America…about non-Jewish politicians being increasingly comfortable dictating to Jews what it means to be Jewish…and a lot more.

Our discussion was inspired by an essay Corey just published in the New Yorker, Two Paths for Jewish Politics. Corey is a Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Read his blog, buy his books!

Listen and have a good night.

We got out of bed this time to talk to Vadmin Nikitin, a journalist and blogger born in Murmansk, about his immigrant experience.

We had a really interesting talk. Vadim’s story is unique. His father, a captain on a fishing ship out of Murmansk, was sent to the U.S. to get an MBA during perestroika. He took Vadmin and his family with him and while they were in America, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. When he returned to Russia right after the failed 1991 putsch, he was told to take a hike. Nobody wanted him back at his job. The huge Soviet Murmansk fishing fleet — worth billions — was being picked up apart and privatized by his former coworkers and comrades and they, not surprisingly, weren’t too eager to share the spoils.

Some of the things we talk about: sanctions and the corruption of the democratic process, Russia’s liberal intelligentsia, 1990s privatization, the war in Ukraine, similarities between “the West” and the Soviet Union…

Enjoy!

PS: You can follow Vadim on Twitter and check out his writing in the London Review of Books and the Nation and others.

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An emergency broadcast from bed. We talk about the secretive and surprising prisoner exchange between America and Russia and get into the details of some of the cases we’ve been following for years. Sweet dreams.

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We are lying flat in our NY bed…back from Montreal. We talk about the latest political news, movies, the death of journalism, and about writing fiction vs. nonfiction. Also if you power through to the end you’ll find out which wildly successful writer Yasha calls “a cisgender white walrus.” Sweet dreams.

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Yasha is back from San Francisco and we talk about his reaffirmed disdain towards the city where he became an American. We also talk about David Berman and his rabbinical poetry, the documentary about his 2007 Israel tour, and the newly surfaced fan fights about whether he’d be supporting Israel or not right now. We do all this under the spell of Biden’s contagious senility, which seems to be affecting our entire society, like something out of the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Have a good night!

Evgenia

David Berman and the Third Temple

We talk about Daniel Simonsen, a Norwegian comic who is blowing up in the New York comedy world. We also talk about another Norwegian, Kris Borgli, who is blowing up in the movie world with recent films like Sick of Myself and Dream Scenario. We discuss how dark Nordic humor is similar to Russian humor. We also answer a reader question about why we don’t live in Russia. All from bed in a hotel room in SoHo.

Have a good morning!

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We react to the debate, live from Manhattan, sitting on a couch. Yasha gets infected by Biden’s dementia and babbles incoherently while Evgenia tries to shoo him off the mic and into bed.

Sweet dreams,

The Russians

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We chat about the trauma of immigration. Yasha likens it to a traumatic brain injury, like a stroke and reminisces about his immigrant circle in San Francisco and why they were so heavily into psychedelics, which was a kind of attempt at self-therapy. Evgenia talks about her own “internal immigrant” experience — and about how Russians who stayed in Russia display the same traumatic cultural symptoms as those that left. It all has to do with the denial of their Soviet past. As a way of getting into this topic we talk about the Soviet immigrant music festival that we crashed this weekend in the Catskills, where we camped out with our daughter surrounded by huge speakers blasting techno music until five in the morning.

—The Russians

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We answer a couple of listener questions and mostly digress a lot.

* Is NYC still cool?

* Where do you find fulfillment and purpose within a culture that hyper-individualizes every aspect the journey?

We didn’t have nearly enough time to get through all the q’s you sent in. But we’ll keep answering one or two in every future episode, so keep them coming.

Sweet dreams.

PS: audio problems should be fixed now.