When Russians almost had the West Coast
Good morning. In honor of the Trump-Putin Alaska meeting — which took place on what used to be Russian territory and which seems to have been a diplomatic dud (the war will go on) — I would like to repost this old episode Evgenia and I recorded about six months after the start of the Ukrainian war about the ghost of Russia’s presence in California and how Europe and Russia were united in their ecocidal quests for fur, which took the Russian Empire to the New World. We also discuss the various attempts at the cultural cancellation of formerly respected Russian and Soviet authors — from Dostoevsky to Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn to Bulgakov — for the crime of being “Russian.”
Listen here:
Problematic Russians
In this ep Evgenia and I talk about our trip to Fort Ross — Russia’s old colonial outpost just north of San Francisco — and the ridiculous recent attempts here in America to cancel “Russian” authors and poets like Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn, Bulgakov, and Brodsky for spreading the cultural bacillus of Russian anti-Ukranianism. Yes, Bulgakov is Ukrainian. But that apparently doesn’t save him. Because, you know, being Russian is state of mind — a mind full of bad thoughts — it’s not about your ethnicity or where you were born.
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