Everything is mediated by algorithms now — the good and the bad; the malicious and the sublime. And that includes politics.

Everything in politics is mediated by platforms and algorithms and the massive corporations that control them: the voter outreach, the organizing, the prediction and modeling, the communication… Even politicians who go against the status quo, like Zohran Mamdani, depend on computer platforms and their algorithms to reach the masses and win elections. People think this is something new, but as far as politics go, we are now in a process that started almost 75 years ago — the better part of a century!

I want to go back in time to the first time that computers entered politics in a major visible way: the presidential election of 1952, which pitted Adlai Stevenson and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

That year CBS made history by contracting with UNIVAC — an early computer company that came out of the U.S. Army — to do live on-air election result predictions, the kind of stuff that’s just done as a matter of fact by all the major networks now.1 Back then no one thought that a computer could do something as complex as predict election results. And even though the UNIVAC did correctly predict the election, the whole bit was done mostly for hype and ratings — a way to draw viewers to the network with a novelty (and a way to advertise this newfangled technology).

But even if it was initially a gimmick, it didn’t remain one for long. Because from then on computers and algorithms increasingly wormed their way into all parts of the political process — not just election day tallying but everything…even affecting how people thought about politics. Adam Curtis talks about this process in his work quite a lot.

Here are some clips about that moment in 1952 when computers entered politics:

Yes, social media addiction is a massive problem in and of itself for the increasingly whipped-on creator class. But what I’m referring to here is regular drug addiction. The people who make internet content seem primed to be addicts themselves. Just the nature of the content economy — the social isolation, the brutal non-stop always-on churn that it requires, the vampiric nature of the work, the whiplash emotional highs and lows of the publishing cycle — demands that you either have an obsessive/workaholic personality and/or you develop a massive drug problem: Uppers for keeping up with the workload — churning out new content, engaging the comment army, keeping up with subscriber threads. And downers for unwinding at the end of the day. From what I’ve seen personally among people in the news industry, pretty much everyone’s hooked on some sort of upper — Adderall or Ritalin. And as any drug user knows, uppers are always paired with something that helps you chill out at the end of the day: xanax, valium, alcohol, ambien, painkillers…. It’s pretty much an open secret as far as the news world goes: most people are speed freaks. They don’t call them news junkies for nothing! But I’m wondering how much wider the problem is in the content creation industry more broadly. I mean, the pressures of the internet content factory are just immense — the competition for people’s attention is a brutal zero-sum game that’s nonstop in its intensity, regardless of whether you’re doing fashion or gaming or political TikToks.

If levels of addiction among general content creators are anywhere close to those of the news world that I have some personal experience with, it brings up a corollary concern: Since so much of our culture is internet/social media now, does that mean culture is now overwhelmingly created by actual drug addicts? If you stand back and look at it, it does seem that way, doesn’t it? The tone of culture on the internet has a distinctly drug addict vibe: hyper-focused, manic, juvenile, superficial, amnesiac, full of tantrums and fleeting obsessions, constantly bouncing between elation and depression and rage and fear and denial. In that sense, the internet itself has become an addiction technology where all content is created by addicts for addicts. As a friend of mine who’s dealt with his own addiction problems wrote me, “You’re right. The whole content-creation industry basically reflects substance addiction almost perfectly: craving, the fleeting high, the inevitable letdown, and then the compulsion to begin the cycle again. And that applies both to the people producing the content and the people consuming it.”

It’s frightening. It seems like this is not a minor thing that should be swept under the rug, but a central issue at the core of what ails society. Democracy? Progress? What do any of these things mean when the engine of our mass media society is a giant addiction machine, dedicated to creating addicts and maintaining the addiction cycle? Society has waged and won an Opium War against itself and is now going all out. Everyone is a victim — all classes…the workers, and the factory owners.

And speaking of wars, the internet itself was born out of warfare — developed by the Pentagon as a counterinsurgency weapon during the Vietnam War Era. This technology went commercial in the 1990s, merging into an atomized society that had long replaced any sort of social meaning and connection with atomization, consumerism, and addiction. So it makes sense that the internet slotted right into this pattern. Well, it didn’t just slot in — the technology was such that it drove the addiction machine into hyperdrive. There are positive elements to this technology, no doubt about it. But the vast bulk of its effects are not. It atomized us even more; made us even more lonely; removed us from our bodies, each other, and our physical surroundings; and then offered us something that promised to ease the pain: itself, the addiction. And this addiction machine is itself being fed by addicted content creators, a hopeless loop of addicts drawing in addicts and presenting it as meaningful connection, empowerment, etc. It’s brutal.

Something has to change, and the change has to come from your personal initiative. The system won’t reform itself because the entire system is predicated on keeping the addiction going. It doesn’t even matter what the underlying politics are any more. At the base of everything, right and left, is the addiction machine.

—Yasha

I’m getting closer to finishing my “sci-fi” novel — about California, nuclear war, nationalism, zionism, the trauma of immigration, drugs, and how modernity broke our connection to the world and ourselves, forcing us to look for meaning in the darkest places. In the process of writing it, I’ve been thinking a lot about the genre I’m nominally working in — “science fiction.” I naturally gravitated towards this genre. In part because, like a lot of teenagers, sci-fi is how I got into reading and literature. It was the gateway through which I learned to love to read, and that interest has stuck with me, although I consider most science fiction to be trashy and superficial. But the real reason I decided to write a sci-fi novel is because I thought sci-fi is the only genre that’s able to describe our lived reality with any sort of accuracy. We live in a scientific world — a world remade by industrialization, technology, and the scientific method. So much of our lives are mediated and controlled and regimented by a million different technologies that to describe the human condition today requires a writer to make technology central to whatever story they are telling.

At some point, though, I started having doubts about the whole sci-fi/non-sci-fi divide. I realized that on a fundamental level, many novels are science fiction novels. To put it another way: it became apparent to me that quite a few of the 19th-century novels that defined this literary form could be described science fiction. To me, the science fiction novel is a novel that deals with the impact of technology on the human condition. And many early novels fit that bill: They’re about people living in a world of rapid technological change of the industrial age. When I think about many of the early novels I’ve read, I realize that their settings are dominated by technology. They feature urban slums, factories, cramped city living, the lives of harried clerks, and the desperation of the working poor, mechanized warfare, and the malaise and psychological struggles of a new prosperous bourgeoisie and professional class created and propped up by capitalism, modernization, mass literacy, railroads, factories, global trade, and massive urban bureaucracies. I can pick out any one of the great classic novels from the last several centuries I’ve read and look at its themes, and they’ll all have social upheaval and change driven by scientific/technological progress lurking in the background.

Obviously, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818, telegraphs its “science fiction” identity by dealing with a fantastical version of the industrial revolution — where the scientific method is taken to its logical conclusion and where man literally tries to become a god. Frankenstein is frequently cited as the defining science fiction novel, and it comes out of the Romantic tradition opposing the ugly destructiveness of industrialization. The inverted twin of Frankenstein is Edward Bellamy’s moronically simplistic Looking Backward, which imagined a limitless consumer utopia based on industrial technologies. In his world, the industrial revolution is taken to its logical conclusion, and that logical conclusion is fully automated luxury communism with no downsides. These two novels are explicitly “science fiction.” They stand out because they are very forward in their scientific dystopian/utopian narratives. But other 19th novels deal with the same themes of industrial upheaval just in a quieter, more matter-of-fact kind of way. Dickens, Zola, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Hugo, Austen…their novels all have social change driven by industrialization and modernization as themes or plots in their works. These forces are at work in the background, shaping people’s lives.

It’s not just the themes. There’s the technological reality of the genre itself. The novel emerged as a distinct form during a period of industrialization and rapid technological “progress.” Even how it was distributed was based on cutting-edge scientific technology: mass-producing printing presses powered in mass quantities by steam engine technology. With this new tech, novels were able to reach a mass audience on a scale never before seen. The novel was part of an emerging technological mass media society. It didn’t just describe it, it emerged out of it — and also played a big role in shaping how people thought about it, related to it. The novel — the themes and narratives that the novel took on, and the technology that made it widely accessible — it all had to do with industrialization and rapid technological change. So it’s not surprising that the novel and science are so interlinked. And the novel is still an incredible technology. It is still — despite our supposed advances in computation and virtual reality — the closest tool we have to transferring one person’s inner world to another. The novel is a technology of mental transference.

The scholarship that I’ve seen on the appearance of the novel places it in the context of the scientific revolution, capitalism, rationalism, and individualism — which are all cultural and economic trends that underpinned industrialization.1 So it’s not surprising that technological change and disruption have been central to the novel from the very beginning. The novel was born in a science fiction world where people thought there would be no limit to technological progress: immortality, unlimited growth, the colonization of the stars…all these ideas are not new but were born at the same time that the novel emerged. There’s nothing unusual about it. Just that the novel was attempting to describe life right at the moment when our world started being bulldozed and fed into the steel maws of industrialization. It’s all very organic that way.

So yeah, it doesn’t seem like a stretch that science fiction goes to the very root of the novel. We just don’t recognize most 19th-century novels as science fiction because the technologies that underpin them seem anachronistic to us today. We’ve been trained by our culture to think that anything “science fiction” has to do with super advanced technologies — flying cars, spaceships, time travel, etc.

What people now think of as “science fiction” now is a mass-market genre developed in America after World War II — geared towards adolescents and men commuting to work. Some incredible literature came out of this pulpy mass of cheap garbage, including Philip K. Dick. But this is just a tiny subsection of “science fiction” that has naturally existed in novel form since the beginning of the novel.

If we take just the novels that this post-1950s sci-fi literary subculture produced, most of them are set in exotic interplanetary locations or the deep mystical past or parallel fantastical universes with wizards and dragons. But even if they are fantastical and take place somewhere far away, these sci-fi novels always took their inspiration from the political, cultural, and technological conditions that existed at the time when they were written. That’s how the creative process works. You can only write about what you know. Writers may try to mask the personal rootedness of their fiction by introducing fantastical settings that have seemingly nothing to do with them, but it is a cheap magician’s trick. You can only write about what you know. It is physically impossible to do anything else. So sci-fi novels (like all novels) are always about the experience and the inner world of the author. Strip down the exotic space dress and a lot of these sci-fi novels — or at least the great and good ones — are a lot closer to the classic 19th-century novel form: novels that told stories about the socio-technological disturbances of their own time.

What’s interesting is that J.G. Ballard understood this. He was a “sci-fi” writer but sought to bring sci-fi back home to reality. He wanted to rescue it from the juvenile path that it had taken — with its swashbuckling space operas and magic dragons — and bring it down to our world. He wanted to make science fiction a regular novel again. Instead of projecting our technological insanity onto some distant star system, he wanted to keep it close to home…to make it explicitly about today…about his own world. Here’s how he described his approach to science fiction in an old interview. And, rereading it now, I’m realizing that he probably would have agreed with my characterization of the modern novel as basically rooted in science fiction:

I was tremendously exhilarated when I started reading American science fiction - the excitement, the enormous power of imagination, etc. But I felt they weren’t really making the most of their own landscapes and subject-matter. Right from the start what I wanted to do was write a science fiction book that got away from spaceships, the far future, and all this stuff which I felt was basically rather juvenile, to writing a kind of adult science fiction based upon the present. Why couldn’t one harness this freedom and vitality? SF is a form, above all else, that puts a tremendous premium upon the imagination, and that’s something that seems to have left the English novel in the last 150 years. Imagination is enormously important, and I felt that if one could only harness this capacity to think imaginatively in an adult SF, one would have achieved something. Right from the beginning I tried with varying success to write a science fiction about the present day, which is more difficult to do than one realizes, because the natural tendency when writing in a basically allegorical mode is to set something at a distance because it makes the separateness of the allegory that much more obvious. I wanted to write about the present day, and I think Crash, Concrete Island and the book I’ve just finished, which are a kind of trilogy, represent the conclusion of the particular logic I’ve been trying to unfold ever since I began writing. Are they SF? I don’t know - maybe the science fiction of the present day will be some-think like Crash. They come into the category of imaginative fiction, don’t they? With a strong moralistic, cautionary and exploratory note. But I don’t know whether they’re SF or not.2

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His sister’s place was in a nondescript three-story house on 32nd Avenue between Fulton and Cabrillo Streets, just half a block from the park and deep in Fat Boris’s territory. The street wasn’t passable now — the territory had been converted into a greenhouse providing fresh produce. So I found parking around the corner and walked over on foot. It was windy, and I was suited up, and I had to wait five minutes outside until the people who had arrived right before me went through the decon tube. Inside, my plastic booties on, I was greeted by a server in a formal black and white dress holding a tray of drinks. “Good evening, sir,” she said, inclining her head and flashing a weak smile. “Would you like a vodka cucumber infusion? It is from the host’s own distillery.” I accepted and walked into the house. There were people everywhere. Women were in evening wear. Men wore jackets and slacks. It was like a high-end cocktail party.

I had only been over to Yulia’s house once, years before the war, and I was surprised by the transformation. Yulia and her last husband had been programmers — she worked at Facebook and he worked at some big financial firm, programming trading algorithms. They made good money, but like most programmers, they lacked any class or style. And so their house, although nominally expensive, had been decorated in the most uninviting utilitarian style: everything was painted white, there was harsh lighting, and IKEA furniture with no care or feeling for how any of it came together. They were typical that way. Nothing out of the ordinary. But now, the house had had a massive makeover. The living and dining rooms were all outfitted in a uniform, elegant mid-century style. There were nice carpets on the floors. Decent abstract art of the mid-century style. And the house itself, built in the early 20th century out of old-growth redwood like most of the original houses out in the Richmond District, had all of its original intricate wood carvings and details restored, and buffed to a deep, almost burgundy brown. It looked like a house decorated in an old-money way — tasteful and reserved. I noticed what I appeared to be a small Louise Bourgeois sculpture on a pedestal — a vaguely phallic shape reminiscent of a dick and balls. A replica? Or pilfered from some museum or private collection? I knew that she had remarried after her old husband died of cancer. So I wondered if this remodeling was the work of her new man — a guy named Augustus. Leo told me about him when I was out at his resort. He was a native San Franciscan who apparently could trace his lineage back to an original East Coast Anglo family that came here to cash in on the Gold Rush. I remember Leo bragging to me what a catch he was. “Very, very high class,” he had said. “His family made their money on cows. Augustus’s great-great-great-grandfather had at one point supplied half of San Francisco with beef. Or that’s the story, anyway.”

I spotted Yulia chatting with a few people by the window, and I walked over to say hello.

“Jake! So glad you could make it,” she said.

“Of course. Thank you for inviting me. What a beautiful house you have,” I said, leaning over and giving Yulia a tepid hug, noticing she had a rather large golden cross hanging on her breast. Another Jewish convert to the Christian faith.

“August, you remember Jake. I told you about him. He’s an old friend of Leo’s,” she said, turning to the man next to her wearing a dinner jacket. “Jake, this is Augustus, my husband.”

“A pleasure to meet you,” I said.

“Yes, a pleasure,” he said, smiling and showing a row of perfect white teeth.

Augustus introduced me to the other people standing with them — people I had never seen before. “This is Robert, Masha’s husband. And this is Yana, she runs the bakery and grocery store—”

“Oh, I know Yana,” I said. “We went to the same middle school.”

I gave Yana a hug.

“What are you up to these days,” Yulia asked.

“The usual. Not much,” I replied. “Although, I’ve recently started to get into the private detective business. So if anyone has any need of one, you should look me up. I’d give out a business card, if I had any,” I joked.

“Really? What kind of things do you do?”

“Well, now just missing persons stuff. Trying to track someone down who disappeared.”

“Fascinating! Was it a kidnapping or…”

“Well, I’m not quite sure exactly. That’s what I’m trying to find out,” I said. “Unfortunately, I can’t discuss the details.”

“Of course, I understand. It’s a rough world out there, isn’t it? So much violence. So much death. People disappear every day,” he said.

Yulia and Augustus were a strange pair, I thought as I stood around listening to the people make small talk. She was tall and thick and dumpy, a dark shadow of a mustache forming above her upper lip. Augustus looked like an older model straight from the pages of an L.L. Bean catalogue. He was lean, had a square jaw, and a full head of blond hair with just a little bit of gray at the temples. He radiated health and vigor. A guy like him would never have even glanced at Yulia before the war. But everything’s changed. I wouldn’t be surprised if Augustus’s old family home is now occupied by some Chinese or Mexican bigwig while his family had been forced out onto the street…

It was then that Leo appeared at my elbow. “Hey, glad you came! I wasn’t sure if you would given how much of a shut-in you’ve been the last few years.” We shook hands. Leo then turned to a beautiful slender woman who walked up just behind him. “Olivia, I want you to meet an old friend of mine. A really talented guy. One of the best,” he said.

“Pleasure to meet you, Olivia,” I said, reaching out my hand.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” she replied, taking my hand and shaking it.

Tall, blond, and slender and probably twenty years younger than Leo, she was another beauty who would have been out of Leo’s reach before the war. But the war changed everything. After collapse, the immigrant was ascendant.

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As the author of Surveillance Valley, I’m somewhat of an aficionado of counterinsurgency/pacification technologies. I have also been doing some intensive biblical reading for my novel, and recently reread the section of Genesis dealing with the Tower of Babel. And Babel is a strange story. It’s injected into the Genesis narrative seemingly out of nowhere, kind of at random, and completely outside of the flow of the story. Its function, on the one hand, seems to be explanatory. It provides a mythological foundation for why there are so many different languages and cultures and so many divisions in humanity, when…you know…the narrative was that early biblical people were supposed to be unified under their One God. On the other hand, the story is a warning about hubris. Humans are not gods and should not aspire to be gods. And if we do, all sorts of bad things will befall us. I guess Icarus falls into that hubris warning category and I’m sure stories and myths like this have existed for as long as people could communicate.

Here’s a bit from Babel:

Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there.

They said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and burn them hard.” Brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar. And they said, “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.”

The LORD came down to look at the city and tower that man had built, and the LORD said, “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another’s speech.”

Thus the LORD scattered them from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city.

The question is why would this god care? Why would this god limit human ingenuity?Why unity such a threat? There’s something in this story that’s highly suspect…

What came to mind is that this Israelite God is acting suspiciously like a classic imperial power — like the Americans or the British and countless other societies throughout history that have ruled over vast lands by dividing and conquering…by pitting their subjects against each other to make sure no one under their rule is able to organize and challenge them. This kind of divide-and-conquer approach has never been just about controlling foreign territories. It has also applies to domestic populations — to managing your own. You could say that the Culture Wars that are running wild these days in America — algorithmically aided and micro-targeted — are part of this same kind strategy. Americans nominally speak the same language, but the cultural references are now wildly divergent and in conflict to the point that the different sides of this culture war don’t really understand one another, recreating a kind of Tower of Babel situation in which people are kept artificially divided and powerless.

Looked at historically, I guess it makes sense that this divide and conquer myth would be injected, seemingly at random, into the Hebrew Bible. The Israelite God was developed in the shadow of the first big empires in Mesopotamia — societies that, as Miller McDonald described in his book Progress, practiced large-scale bureaucratic parasitism on the people and the land that they ruled. These were the first centralized mega-technological societies and they required a sophisticated ideological system that allowed the many to be ruled by the few…with an emperor or a king serving as a god just below the God or Gods. So it would make sense that this Israelite God would display the same kind of ruthless centralized management system deployed by earthly rulers to manage restive populations. After all, all our gods, when they become systematized and part of a ruling structure, are just reflections and justifications for how power on Earth is wielded. Our gods are descriptive of the time and place they are worshipped. So, yeah, it makes sense that the Israelite God would be a counterinsurgency guy.

—Yasha

Want to know more?

We’re screening Little Vera this Sunday — part of our Soviet Collapse Cinema series that’s running every Sunday night in July. The film is about the life of a typical Soviet girl, a kind of coming-of-age story. It hit the screens in the USSR in 1988 (a year before I left with my family) and was very popular and scandalous because it portrayed Soviet life in a more or less natural way: everyday alcoholism, minor domestic abuse, cramped living conditions, family strife, crumbling industrial infrastructure…stuff that didn’t comport with the usual official line that everything was great. It also featured the first sex scene and nudity in a Soviet movie. So the film was iconoclastic in that way.

The film marked another historical first. Its star, Natalya Negoda, the one who played Vera, was the first Soviet woman to appear in Playboy. Little Vera was a big hit in the West, too, did well in the festival circuit, and the Playboy feature was part of its Western promotional tour.

I couldn’t help myself, so I got the May 1989 Playboy issue that featured this historic spread. The photo spread and drooling and triumphant text that accompanied it is interesting on a few different levels. First, it foreshadowed something that was just around the corner for a lot of women in the USSR: a de facto market prostitutization of the female body on a scale never before experienced by the population. This wasn’t something that was imposed purely from the outside — lots of Russians were eager to jump into this new world of market relations in everything, including in romantic relationships themselves. The feature also captured something you don’t see very much anymore: an America full of swagger and haughtiness. The America of May 1989 was an America entering peak empire mode, full of confidence and sure of its own superiority and future…a feeling that you don’t get in America any more.

From the spread:

Thanks to Gorbachev, that notoriously opaque curtain has begun to show signs of see-through seductiveness, permitting a little political peekaboo between East and West. Naturally, Playboy’s editors were delighted late last year when some quiet negotiations well below the summit offered reasonable hope that the screen sensation wowing them from Minsk to Moscow might be free to fly West for a revealing pictorial. “Twas the month before Christmas, and visions of glasnost and perestroika danced in our heads. Soon, Natalya herself arrived in Los Angeles, accompanied by interpreter Viviane Mikhalkov, to confer with West Coast Photo Editor Marilyn Grabowski, whose first impression was that a Soviet-American space walk might be easier than a joint effort in photography. “Natalya seemed dour, even grim,” Marilyn recalls, “and gave off an aura of not trusting Playboy or Americans in general. When we asked questions, the word we heard more than anything else was nyet.” Roughly two weeks later, their cold war had dissolved in a détente of girl talk and good vibes…

Some scans of the photo shoot below…

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This is a friendly reminder to everyone who lives in the New York area that tickets are now on sale for the next film in our SOVIET COLLAPSE CINEMA SERIES. We’re screening LITTLE VERA, a Soviet film that came out in 1988 about the life of a typical late Soviet girl. Sunday, July 12th at 7 p.m. in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

BUY TICKETS

I was the first Soviet film to feature nudity and a sex scene. And, in a foreshadowing of the extreme prostitutization that would happen to so many Russian women after the Soviet collapse, Natalya Negoda, the actress who played the leading role, posed naked in Playboy in 1989 to promote the film abroad. So Little Vera is not just a great film, it’s prophetic in a lot of ways.

Evgenia and I will discuss the film and its political and cultural context during a Q&A after the film.

Here is Natalya Negoda on the cover:

Want to know more? Check out the rest of the NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS SOVIET COLLAPSE CINEMA SERIES! Happening every Sunday the entire month of July in Greenpoint.

I parked out front with enough distance to not be obvious but still have a clear view of the building. I had a pair of binoculars, some food and water, and even a flask of compost moonshine. I was here for the long haul, ready to spend the night if necessary.

For the first few hours, there was little to report. It was Friday morning, and there were quite a few people out. Pedestrians, a decontamination crew in yellow hazmat suits hosing down some buildings, a couple of junk peddlers pushing their carts towards Market Street…Things were just like I had seen them two weeks ago, when I first met with the rabbi. The nondescript single-story warehouse with metal bars that covered a set of tall, opaque glass windows, the alley with the dusty white van parked out front — the the same van, I was sure now more than ever, that was in the surveillance footage from the resort.

Two things had happened since my last entry. One: Tommy called. Before I left Bakersfield, I left him a bit of cash and asked him to do some snooping for me. I wanted him to ask around if anyone he knew had seen any domes out by the prison, the kind of domes that were in that photo of Misha. “I don’t need you to look too deeply. There’s gotta be people who’ve been out that way in the last year or so. Was there ever something there or not?” Last night Tommy finally got back to me. “Nope no domes. The place’s always been an empty lot…ever since the navy dismantled the entire neighborhood for building materials, I mean,” he said. “One guy, a friend of my cousin’s, does regular maintenance work at the prison a few times a month. He told me he’s sure as hell they never been any domes there or any company with no R&D department or any shit like that. So you got some bum intel, boss.”

After I hung up, I wondered what the whole thing could be about. Why did Misha cook up this Bakersfield R&D story? Why set up a fable about a research center and spoof photographs? Just to trick his wife? And where did he go on his business trips, if he wasn’t going down to his company’s R&D department Bakersfield? Where did he disappear to for days at a time? It didn’t really make much sense.

And speaking of his wife, Sara. The day that Audrey left, she sent over four boxes to my apartment. “For your investigation,” she explained. They were filled with books and various papers. She had found them squirreled away in a nook in Misha’s bunker office — “in a far corner of the utility closet with all the pumps and pipes.” The boxes were neatly organized. The first three of them had books — commentaries on the Torah and the Talmud, academic works on the history of ancient Judaism, Biblical archaeology and linguistics, several like antique travel books from the Holy Land… Most of the books were thick with notes scribbled in the margins — just like Misha’s Torah. The fourth box had hand written notes and pamphlets and various loose materials — organized with folders by topic: Karaites, Apocalyptic Prophesies, Illicit Centralization of God, Talmudic Degeneracy…

Figuring I’d have a lot of time to kill, I took one of the boxes with me in the van with me. Looking through it, I was impressed. It was all very meticulous, as if Misha had been writing a book or working on a dissertation. I was never as systematic about things when I worked on big projects as journalist. But it as wasn’t the OCD organization that impressed me. It was the content — or, rather, it was what the content portended…what it meant to my investigation. Until now, the only insight I had into Misha’s inner world was that single marked up Torah I had found under his couch and the religious forum he frequented before the war. But the forum only took me so far — right up until the nukes started falling. Beyond that? I really had nothing. His last few years ± everything that led up to his disappearance — have been a blank. His wife’s been no help. His old friends — at least the ones I’ve been able to track down — didn’t know, either. One thing I knew is that he had been living some sort of double life. But what kind of life, and why he was hiding it from everyone he knew…well that was the mystery at the heart of this case. I sensed that if I could answer this question, I’d be able to find out where he went. And this…well…it offered another clue.

Until now, I thought that there was some kind of midlife crisis involved. He wrote as much to his religious internet buddies before the war. He realized that his pursuit of corporate status and wealth and bureaucratic achievement hadn’t paid off in the way he thought. He felt empty, estranged from his family. He was looking for something more meaningful and durable, and that’s why he turned to religion — the Chabad-Lubavitcher sect of Judaism. As far as things went, it was all very mundane. A midlife crisis…a turning to god? This path is so common as to basically be cliche. It’s the whole Born Again phenom that people mocked. But the contents of this box showed that his religious development went deeper. No, not just deeper — the development evolved in an unexpected direction.

What do I mean? Let me give you an example from a folder titled “EVIDENCE OF REVISION (OR: WHAT EXACTLY DID MOSES WRITE?).” It had a bunch of print outs and handwritten notes, complete with diagrams and book excerpts. All of them dealt, in one way or another, with the issue of how much of the text of the Torah, which he had believed was an infallible document, could be believed.

If the text is all we have. If we believe that the text of the Torah still contains the Divine spark in it (as I do), then we have no choice but to use the text to find the truth, even if the text itself has been changed, edited, and reworked over thousands of years by human hands. And this is now our mission. This is the task that we have laid out for ourselves.

Jewish tradition has held that the Torah as a holy document was literally dictated by G-D to Moses. All the books starting from Genesis going all the way to the book of Prophets were given by G-D after he rescued them from enslavement in Egypt. There is some disagreement among the Jewish sages about the exact time and place that each book was written down. Some claim that Moses got the entire Torah while up on Mt. Sinai. Others argue that he got parts of it there, and other parts of it were transmitted to him a short time later when he was already down in the desert. Still, others claim that Moses didn’t write any of it down right away but committed it all to memory and passed it down orally for several generations exactly as G-D dictated it until it was finally written down — committed to papyrus and/or leather scrolls. But a general consensus, despite the usual bickering of the old rabbis, exists. The Torah as it exists today is the Holy Word, with each letter and each space written down exactly as it was relayed by G-D to Moses. At the synagogue on Balboa, my rabbi told me this several times: “Yes, of course Moses wrote the whole Torah down as it exists today. He wrote it down exactly as G-D told it to him.” He then sent me a link to a website — a “Torah FAQ” or something like that, and there it said something to the effect of: “Moses was the conduit for Divine communication. He received explicit instructions from G‑D and relayed precisely and without any personal interpretation or editing. At first it was likely that much of it was passed orally but it was then transcribed precisely — exactly — as G-D first relayed it to Moses. This precision is important because the Torah isn’t just an ordinary text, it contains the whole universe within it. Every word, every letter is perfect — just how G-D intended. It is why, for instance, those with proper training can use the Torah to predict the future. It contains a secret code…”

I never really thought about it deeply until I started learning Hebrew and the Torah, and getting a bit into the weeds of the history of this incredible document. Right away it was clear that something did not add up.

For one, there is no original text. There is no original papyrus or leather scroll that Moses wrote on that we can point to and say: “This is the one.” Instead, we have a patchwork of editions of the Torah — from different time frames and different Jewish sects with slight variations to them, and the earliest versions were written in a different alphabet altogether. Yes, the Hebrew that people think of Hebrew is not actually Hebrew.

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The other type that the algo funneled me into was the flip side of this same group. These were women in their late thirties and early forties who were frantically trying to find a man they could pair off with. They had put off having kids and instead had focused on their careers and their personal freedom and growth, and now they were entering the end of their fertility window and had a tiny sliver of time in which to find a suitable partner. They also looked at me as a means to an end — not a dildo but a potential sperm donor, preferably one with a stable job and savings. And for this group, I wasn’t a good match, either. A divorcee with no real job, living off rental income that went mostly to my daughter as child support? They smelled failure on me, and they were not wrong. Even in the couple of cases where we got along and had fun and seemed like a good match, the women broke off contact. I sensed that they didn’t want to end it but felt they must before “it got serious.” I wasn’t a viable partner in their eyes, and so they couldn’t waste time on me. They didn’t have the luxury. They weren’t in their twenties anymore. I found all this depressing, but it was interesting from a purely sociological perspective. And, of course, I did get laid once in a while. Women were treating love and friendship as a consumer would. Man was an object to find and enjoy…something to shop for. I felt objectified in a way that I guess women had been objectified for a long time. Feminism had triumphed. Or a certain kind of feminism, anyway. Objectification now went both ways. The war and the fallout changed things, though. Changed them for the better.

There was a woman in the garage where I spent the first few days after the war, when we still weren’t sure if the initial exchange we heard about on the news was about to expand into a global war. We were strangers and had set up our bedrolls next to each other purely by chance. Like everyone else, I was exhausted and teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I threw myself down on my sleeping bag and spent half the night in a fitful adrenaline crash sleep — tossing and turning, tired and unable to stay awake and yet unable to sleep, not knowing if I was about to be annihilated by a nuclear bomb or not, my thoughts filled with my daughter and explosions and screams. She was going through the same thing. Without thinking or talking or even flirting, we somehow ended up merging our bedding in the middle of the night, and just slept together. She lay on my chest. I had my arm around her. She’d wake up and whimper periodically. I’d stroke her hair, calming her down. I had a bottle of Xanax, and I shared it with her, giving both of us a double dose. It felt good to care for someone else. It distracted me from my own panic. I can’t even remember her name now. I can barely recall what she looked like. All I can recall is that she was a recent transplant to the city, and we talked about how nice it was to jog the Land’s End trail. Like most corporate workers in the city, she was an avid jogger. We spent the next few nights together. We had sex those times. It wasn’t transactional. It wasn’t planned. I hadn’t been thinking about how I could woo her or get into her pants. We were just drawn together, exhausted after a day spent in the dark, damp underground garage, wondering if the world was about to end, our nerves completely shot. The sex came out of pure, innocent need of connection…to be with someone…to not feel alone. It was true love-making, a surrendering of your own individuality, rather than the individualistic gratification that a lot of casual sex had been before the war. We paired off like that every night until I left the bunker to go out on my own. I even invited her to come with me, but she declined. She was too scared to go outside, she said. She’d take her chances here. We hugged. And I left.

Thinking about it now, most of the relationships I had after the war were similar that way — on the one hand, they were casual, on the other, they were very deep in a way I hadn’t really felt before. There was the woman from around the corner who owned an entire Victorian up the hill from me — or her husband and she owned it. Abigail, her name was. Her husband and her two kids died during that first long lockdown, when the fallout finally got to us. They went out quickly — an aggressive cancer of some kind. Her doctor friends later told her it was probably leukemia or some other blood cancer. For whatever reason, maybe genetic, they were hypersensitive to radiation exposure, and she wasn’t. It played out like this all over. In fact, the survivors — people like me, alive right now — made it through the initial bottleneck. We’re still getting cancer and strange mutations the longer we live in this dust. But we’re the tough ones…the ones who can take some radioactive punishment. I met Abigail at the local swap meet right after the first lockdown ended — people came out to trade…to give out what they didn’t need and look for what they did. She had a Blu-ray player, and I needed one just in case the one I had broke. We got to talking. It was clear she was lonely and I was lonely. I invited her over to watch a film. We got along. Her big Victorian was filled with the extended family of one of her nieces that ran from the fallout in the north, so she started spending more time at my place. We tended my little garden. She brewed compost beer. She even started helping out with my pill barter business, and went out on a couple of scavenging trips with me. We had an idyllic home-life. Just two people randomly thrown together, and the sex was just a natural part of it. It didn’t last. A few months after we met, she suddenly died. I still don’t know what it was. An aneurysm? Some kind of internal cancer? Or maybe just grief and depression? There was no one left to mourn her except for me. So I borrowed a cargo bike from a neighbor and rode out with her body to the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge. And there, after taking a moment of silence, I pitched her over the railing with the help of a passerby, giving her an ocean burial. That’s how we did funerals. There were always too many bodies to bury and not enough space.

A few months later, I met another woman — this time through Skinny’s network.

Her name was Ann, and Skinny’s people were helping move her south to reunite her with some family she had living down in San Mateo after her parents and husband had died. She was supposed to stay only for a few days with me while they figured out the logistics, but we got along, and she ended up staying with me for six months. We talked about her staying with me permanently, but then she died, too. It started with seizures. Since there was no way to do any tests, it was almost certainly some sort of cancer that spread into her brain. The seizures got progressively worse, and finally, she lost consciousness. I took care of her as best I could for several weeks, but when she went into a coma and couldn’t eat…I asked a doctor friend about what to do…and he came over with an insulin injection, and we both watched her quietly die. It seemed like the ethnical thing to do. She never did reach her extended family, not like they cared much — they had their own problems to worry too much about it. In fact imagine they were relieved. They dodged a bullet. If she hadn’t stayed with me, they would have had to nurse her while she died. I biked to the Golden Gate Bridge and pitched her over the side, too. I had buried two women that I had gotten to know intimately, and even to love — all within half a year. I wondered if I was going to bury Audrey, too. Or maybe she’s going to bury me.

We finally got a big batch of our beautiful book from the printers: the NEFARIOUS RUSSIAN MINDSET: MANUAL FOR SURVIVAL. You can now purchase it (and other merch, including hats) over at our store. For a limited time, all books will be signed by us. You can watch our masterclass on using ancient Soviet collectivist wisdom to survive American decline…

And a friendly reminder: Tickets for our first Soviet Collapse Series screening this Sunday are selling out. We’re kicking off with Cargo 200 by Aleksei Balabanov. Get them today. We’ll host a Q&A and discussion after the film — moderated by Keith Gessen, author of A Terrible Country.

I finished this film last summer, and in fact, it was screened at a NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS LIVE event almost a year ago to the date. So some of you might have already seen it. For the rest of you, D8DDY is a quasi-documentary/hyperreal film about a down-and-out journalist who turns to online sex work to support his family — with me, Yasha, and our daughter playing ourselves in an alternate reality. Best watched on a big screen.

CREDITS 
Director: Evgenia Kovda
Journalist: Yasha Levine
Wife: Evgenia Kovda
Daughter: E Levine
Fan: Sean Lynch
Friend: Anthony Galluzzo
Italian friends: Vova and Marina
Camera: Evgenia Kovda, Rowan Wernham, Yasha Levine
Theme song lyrics and vocals: Evgenia Kovda and Yasha Levine; music: Danny P.

That’s me on the left as “Johanna Muscle”

Not long ago, I digitized some 8mm cassettes that contained proof that my adolescent art music band “The Broads” (Бабы) actually existed.

I founded “The Broads” with my friend Katya, whom I met and bonded with at a boarding kindergarten our parents exiled us to at age four. The band didn’t exist for long and never performed outside an apartment. We just made a few music videos and mockumentaries on pop stars when we were twelve and thirteen years old. We didn’t have editing tools, so we had to do live editing — just turning off the camera and turning it back on when we were ready to shoot the next scene. This was sometime around 2002 — the beginning of the end of the wild and chaotic Yeltsin Era. I rewatched it recently, and I found it funny how little I actually changed. I was a satirist already then, working in the same kind of film genre that I’d start returning to more a decade later. What surprises me even more is that I actually had critical distance from my society at such an early age. Even back then, I laughed at the ludicrous and macabre image of the ideal woman that was pushed on us in post-Soviet Russia — a bimbo with a big bosom, bright makeup, short skirt, and dumb songs to boot. Sometimes those women were called “singing panties,” but for our generation — raised in a media saturated capitalist Russia — they did seem like a paragon to emulate.

Back then my friend and I watched MTV Russia religiously and were listening to all the usual pop trash girls our age were exposed to, and we had very little parental or societal supervision in terms of our media consumption. We also went to movie rental stores and got any film we wanted without anyone asking any questions, including, for example, Romance by Catherine Breillat that we watched at thirteen or fourteen and which turned me off pregnancy for a very long time.

Back to “The Broads.” Here is a song we did called “Hairy Armpit.” I put subtitles on the video, but it’s easy to guess what it’s about: the curse of having hairs growing on our armpits. We dress up to look like vulgar hookers here with socks stuffed into our bras, and I remember that we thought it was so very funny — because it was very far from our fairly protected little world where no one was prostitute or even a housewife. Our mothers were a lawyer and a translator. Yet I think without our unconscious awareness, we did channel something real and quite scary that we saw around us, as many girls in Russia our age or a bit older were underage hookers in one way or another.

This prostitutization of a whole generation of women during and after Soviet collapse — this is something I think about quite a lot today, and it’s strange to see that it was present in my thinking even when I was a kid. For it to seep into the mind of a child shows how prevalent it was. I was obviously not the only one thinking about it. A lot of adults were, too. The plight of women during collapse is pretty much the main theme of the all the Russian films we’re screening as part of our Soviet collapse cinema this summer.

Here is an art explications I wrote as a parody for this video:

The song is a reaction of two young girls who just hit puberty to the aggressive Western pop culture that flooded Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s.

The image of a glamorous diva that was all over Russian MTV and other TV channels was an example of the woman you should aspire to become — a sexy object in a miniskirt and a provocative top with heavy make-up on. “The Broads” was conceived as a parody of those divas.

In essence, “Hairy Armpit” is a product of the very early feminist awakening that led Katya and Evgenia to develop this satirical gaze on the female body and its objectification. By assuming a diva identity and exaggerating femininity to the point of grotesquerie, the girls expose the artifice of the female ideal presented by the media.

Katya and Evgenia switch between very contradictory characters in “Hairy armpit” — alternating between sexy divas and grandmothers too poor to even afford bread. As grandmothers, they perform a sassy synchronized dance that adds another layer to the quality of the satire. While “Hairy armpit” is a parody of a pop music video, it also serves as a social critique of the abominable condition of elderly women in Russia at the time. There is a striking contrast between the objectification of young women and the complete neglect of old ones — a dichotomy that is still very real in Russia.

Invoking the Deleuzian notion of “becoming-woman,” Katya and Evgenia, then just girl-children on the verge of womanhood, channeled all the angst they had from abusive media that surrounded them into “The Broads,” creating a counter-narrative to this broken culture.

—Evgenia

P.S. I need to make subtitles for a mock press conference that “The Broads” did for the release of their debut album. Maybe sometime later…

As we explain in the intro to our self-help booklet, which you can now purchase:

As people who were brought up in a more collectivist culture, we see that the biggest weakness of America is the cult of individualism.

Individualism is one of the most powerful myths here. It’s basically enshrined as one of the divine laws of the land — “Be Selfish” might as well be the 11th Commandment, handed down by Moses and ratified by Jesus Christ. This myth has made individualism synonymous with strength and vitality. The image of the perfect American is the cowboy and the industrialist. The strength of the individual vs. the weakness of the collective — this is the idea pushed by another Russian immigrant, Ayn Rand.

When society is stable, institutions function, and things more or less work as promised, individualism does seem real. You can go out and make money and then buy everything you need to survive. You don’t need to lean on friends or family or your community; you can just tap the market for goods and services: nannies, movers, shrinks… They’re all there for you to purchase, if you have the means. These transactional relationships take up all the space and are seen as normal, while friendships remain decorative and aloof. You’re not supposed to impose on people or ask them to help — you don’t want to be a drag and you don’t want your friends to be a drag either.

Americans have been psyopped into thinking that individualism is strength. We see it differently. Individualism is fragility. Individualism depends on impersonal institutions — you become dependent on a job and consumer relationships for everything. If you lose your job, your whole life will come crumbling down. Real strength lies in collectivism — in cooperation with other people.

The thing to remember is that America’s cult of individualism is a historic aberration. It came out of a very particular period of American history. It’s a product of a post-WWII economic boom and a need for a countervailing ideology in America’s fight against communism. Individualism was created by a deliberate propaganda campaign, foisted on Americans through films, books, even art. The idea that sustain individualism are ubiquitous, and yet individualistic society is very fragile. Its survival depends on post-WWII institutions — institutions that, paradoxically, are rooted in socialistic principles and were in fact created in response to the threat posed by the Soviet Union…

So watch our MASTERCLASS. Don’t just survive. THRIVE!

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We also discuss the failed Limonov biopic — Limonov: The Ballad — which came out a few years ago. (In which Limonov was played by Pingo — for fans of Nathan Barley.)

Want to know more?

• Listen to our other eps about Limonov.

Posters for: Cargo 200, Little Vera, Sisters, and Interdevochka.

The NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS would like to announce their SOVIET COLLAPSE CINEMA series. Four weekends this summer in Brooklyn, Evgenia and Yasha will be screening different Russian films from the late 1980s and 1990s — all of them set in a decaying or collapsed Soviet society and focused on the plight of young women trying to survive.

These are cult Russian films that have rarely been screened in American theaters.

These movies are not only a historic document. They are relevant to America today. America has entered its own age of decline — the signs are hard not to see. As people who have lived through the decline and collapse of the USSR, Evgenia and Yasha see a lot of parallels between what happened there and what is happening now in the US. You could say Russia’s past is from America’s future.

All films will be shown with English subtitles.

There will be a discussion and a Q&A after each screening moderated by a surprise celebrity guest.

Location: Film Noir Theater. 122 Meserole Ave, Brooklyn.

Tickets: $25.

Space is limited. Buy tickets in advance.

SEE ALL FILMS

If you are from the press and would like to attend or write about the event, direct all inquiries to Stacy Schneider-Weiss: stacysw.pr@penguinmail.com.

To quote from our NEFARIOUS RUSSIAN MINDSET MANUAL FOR SURVIVAL, in which we use ancient Soviet wisdom to help Americans survive and thrive during decline (on sale this Sunday at the KGB Bar):

“Under individualism, males are exploited…Men in America will not be liberated with Men’s Rights individualism. True male liberation will only come with collectivism.”

Take a listen. And…

Want to know more?

We here at NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS have been speaking and writing about American decline. It’s hard to not notice the signs. The procession of senile heads of state, top-level corruption, pointless wars, wide-scale cynicism, soaring costs of living, an insulated and parasitic elite involved in the pursuit of fantastic projects — like their attempts to build all-powerful AI slaves to replace the unstable mass of humanity underneath them.

The decline is noticeable everywhere. Americans are increasingly moving abroad or dreaming of moving, and millions watch videos of Chinese high-speed trains and modern infrastructure with disbelief and longing. “Why can’t we have this here?” It reminds us of the way Soviet people dreamed of moving abroad; the way they salivated over American cars and blue jeans.

Yes, as immigrants from another collapsed society, we see you Americans and try not to enjoy the schadenfreude too much. In fact, we empathize with you enough to offer a practical manual to survive and even thrive during collapse. We’re drawing on ancient Soviet wisdom for self-help — wisdom we didn’t know was worth very much until recently!

We have experienced collapse in our own ways. Yasha’s early childhood was in the last decade of Soviet Leningrad. Memories of food shortages and empty grocery stores and abandoned construction sites. His parents, even though they had decent, stable jobs and their own new apartment, believed so little in a Soviet future that they decided to flee the country as if they were running from a war zone, thinking that it was better to plunge into the unknown and even live in refugee camps and start all over at 40 with two kids than to remain at home. That’s how little faith they had in their own country. Yasha had relatives and family friends who stayed and lived through the collapse. His cousin became a mail-order Russian bride, his childhood friend’s sister became a prostitute, the next-door neighbor kid he used to play with got hooked on heroin, fell under the train, survived but got his legs cut off, and eventually died of AIDS.

Evgenia was born a few years before Boris Yeltsin dissolved the USSR, and she grew up in a truly collapsed society — among rampant cynicism, a nonexistent government, Moscow run by thugs and mafia, makeshift markets selling cheap Chinese goods as if Moscow was a shantytown, a “tochka” where women sold their bodies not far from her apartment, and a class of carnivalesque New Russians zooming around in Range Rovers and blowing through money at expensive restaurants and casinos. It was surreal — like living through the reverse of the Russian Revolution. Turned out that this shock privatization was as painful for people as collectivization was. So the people suffered again, while a tiny minority enriched themselves and bohemians enjoyed freedom of speech, the lifting of censorship, and freedom of travel.

We look at what’s happening here in the United States and can’t help but feel empathy. We’ve lived through collapse. We were formed by it. We’d like to help. This upcoming event on June 7th in NYC is about.

To us outsiders, to people who came from a more collectivist society, we see that one of the biggest weaknesses of American society is the cult of individualism that has been pushed on everyone here.

Individualism is one of the most powerful myths in America. It’s basically enshrined as one of the main divine laws of the land — “Be Selfish” might as well be the 11th Commandment here, handed down by Moses and ratified by Jesus Christ. This myth has made individualism synonymous with strength and vitality. Being selfish and self-reliant is like rock that can’t be broken: cowboys, tycoons. This is the idea pushed by another Russian immigrant, Ayn Rand. The strength of the individual vs the weakness of the collective.

And when society is stable, institutions function, and things more or less work as promised, individualism seems to work. You can go out there and make money and then buy things that you need to survive. You don’t need to lean on friends or family or your community; you can just tap the commercial market for goods and services: nannies, movers, shrinks… They are all there for you to buy. Transactional relationships take up all the space and are seen as normal while friendship remains decorative and aloof. You are not supposed to impose on people or ask them to help — you don’t want to be a drag and you don’t want friends to be a drag either.

Americans have been psyopped into thinking that individualism is a strength. But we see it differently: Individualism is fragility. Individualism depends on impersonal institutions — you become dependent on a job and market for everything, even things that shouldn’t be commercial. And if those institutions fail or you lose access to them, your whole life will come crumbling down. Real strength lies in collectivism — in cooperation with other people. TaskRabbit is not cooperation, but the opposite of it. Paying someone $20 to install your shelf is psychotic, not normal and efficient.

The thing to remember is that America’s cult of individualism is a historic aberration. It came out of a very particular period of American history. It’s a product of the post-WWII economic boom and the need for a countervailing ideology in America’s fight against communism. Individualism is largely a psyop, foisted on Americans through films, books, even art. And this individualistic society is very fragile. Its survival depends on post-WWII institutions — institutes that, paradoxically, are rooted in socialistic principles. And when these institutions begin to implode, so will individualism. Material conditions will force people to abandon individualism one way or another. And as things get progressively worse, people will have no choice but to embrace a collectivist mode of living. This psyop won’t survive collapse.

And that’s a good thing. Collapse isn’t only bad. There are positive elements, too. Along with hardship and struggle, it’s a time for renewal and reconfiguration. There’s freedom from rotten institutions and toxic societal expectations, and a chance to remake society. It’s good for art and anyone doing anything creative. And for others, it’s a chance to get out of the dead-end bullshit corporate jobs and do something meaningful with their life. Don’t be scared. It can be liberating.

So come out on Sunday June 7th.

A bad NEFARIOUS RUSSIAN tricked you poor Americans into cruel Objectivism. So it’s up to a couple of good (and much better looking) NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS to teach you to be Collectivist again — and collectivism is the most natural state of man.

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BUY THE BOOK

We moved to the living room and sat on a couch facing the big window. I was leaning back, drinking the cider now, watching a beam of sunlight crawl across the wall and listening to Audrey describe her daily schedule at the resort. “I never thought I’d end up like this — working as a bar wench. It was I who had servants. It was I who sat by the pool and was waited on.” She laughed and took another drag off her joint. She was leaning back now, too, looking at the ceiling. “Hard to believe that life was real, you know? You shoulda seen the home we had in Marin. Weekdays we were at our place in SF and then on most Thursdays, if we didn’t have anything happening socially, we’d head out and spend the weekends in Bolinas, surfing, lounging, visiting friends. The old me wouldn’t believe the now-me, but I strangely like my new life,” she said, speaking sluggishly, slightly slurring her speech on account of all the weed she’s been smoking. “I was so bored back then. It was too nice. Too comfortable. I sorta knew it back then but…I was too scared to admit it, I think. Keeps me busy…plenty of interesting people to observe, and when I’m not on my shift, I take care of the chickens, tend the garden, sunbathe, read, take walks around the resort beyond the walls. I’d live on the property full time, if I could. But Leo makes me rotate out once in a while, says I need to spend time in society. But…what society? I come back to a studio I rent from one of Leo’s distant aunts in an apartment building full of immigrant families that always smells like onion and cabbage. So my favorite place to live is the hotel where I work. I’m like some English peasant attached to the land or something. And I can trace my lineage back to the Mayflower, you know that?” She was giggling now, uncontrollably. “And now I’m changing linens in a hotel…and liking it.”

I watched her as she spoke, the light from the window falling on her face. I got the sense she wasn’t even talking to me but just vocalizing her inner thoughts…she didn’t expect any reply from me…she didn’t seem aware that I was there at all. But all her talk about her fallen status reminded of a short novel I read about the Russian Revolution. There were a few characters in there, aristocratic young women, who had to resort to sleeping with crude peasants who had become powerful Soviet bureaucrats after the Bolsheviks took power just so they wouldn’t starve. I tried to remember how it ended…one of the young aristocratic women ended up committing suicide, I think. And I realized I was seeing Audrey up close for the first time. When we had met and she spent the night in my bungalow, I had been high on oxys and drinking all day. My mind had been fuzzy. Now I was much more sober and saw her in the full resolution of daylight. She exuded a classic regal beauty — the only sign that something wasn’t right was her skin. I want to say it was like a cadaver’s, but that would be too much. Her skin had a grayish tint to it and was slightly pitted. When she’d laugh and move her head, I’d see the tension build up in the skin of her neck, with long lateral stringy ripples appearing on the surface, like if you were stretching out cellophane. It was something you saw in people exposed to direct radiation in the early days of the fallout — at least those who survived. Anetoderma it was called, a destruction of the skin’s subcutaneous fat and collagen. Being up in Bolinas, stuck there for days on Highway 1 with hundreds of thousands of other people fleeing south to the city, she got a good dose of cesium-137 and iodine-131 and strontium-90, gamma waves hitting her skin like millions of invisible flechettes, grinding up the epidermis, dermis, hypodermis, killing sweat glands, nerves, capillaries, calcifying arteries and veins…If you were lucky to not have your skin go cancerous on you, you were left with skin that aged fifty years in a week.

“A hunting party came through and killed a two-headed black bear right after the lockdown was lifted,” Audrey was saying, still talking to the ceiling. “It was sad. Why kill such a magnificent creature? It’s sociopathic. Those hunters make me really angry. But Leo says he needs the business these asshole killers bring. They’re the most stable clients…they keep the resort afloat. A family stayed with us at the same time. They had two kids. Well…actually, I guess, technically, three. Two of them were those, what do you call them, Siamese twins. One body from what I could see, but two heads. So we had these asshole mutant hunters and this mutant baby in the resort at the same time. They were there at the same time. I thought it was super weird. The hunters were at the bar by the pool talking loudly about their kills…bragging about all the mutants they tracked and slaughtered while the father with the Siamese twins swam with his girls right there no more than five feet away, holding them up by their armpits in the water.” She paused to take a hit off her joint. “I just found that to be so off-putting.”

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LIVE EVENT ALERT!

Evgenia and Yasha will conduct a NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS MASTERCLASS in Manhattan on how to survive and thrive during AMERICAN DECLINE using ancient Soviet wisdom.

A limited edition booklet will be available for sale. You can buy one with your ticket in advance.

Tickets: $20.

Ticket + signed special edition how-to guide: $35.

Discussion and drinks after.

The NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS return to discuss Wizard of the Kremlin, a new film about Putin’s rise to power, where Jude Law plays Putin. Yeah, Jude Law. While formally it’s a pretty bad film that feels like an illustrated wikipedia article, we were still surprised by it. Because, for a mainstream film, it offered a fairly honest and factual portrayal of the preconditions to Putin’s rise to power and why his reestablishment of the power vertical in Russia was popular. We didn’t expect much and it exceeded our (low) expectations on that front. This is maybe the first western film about the Soviets/ Russians that shows them not as caricatures but with a bit of humanity and respect. This feels like a seismic shift — Did Putin conquer Hollywood or does reality increasingly have a pro-Putin bias?

Some notes…

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