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.

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