Slava Malamud
Slava Does America
Sovietization of the GOP
A fellow ex-Soviet immigrant tweeted at me today offering a thoroughly unsurprising take. How can I hate Republicans and love Communists on the other side of the isle? I, who escaped the horrors of communism myself! How could I embrace such raging Brezhnevites as… American liberals? Fellow ex-Soviets, particularly those over a certain age, have long stopped surprising me with their rabidly uncompromising view of American politics. It might be […] Read More
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My N-Word
“Go back where you came from” is my N-word. It’s not the only one I ever had. Back in the Soviet Union, there was the Ж-word, “жид”, given to anyone with Jewish ancestry. A large part of the reason I am here is to escape it. I did and promptly acquired a new one. It’s my N-word because I often find it impossible to explain to people why exactly it […] Read More
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Politics Is a Team Sport
The political hysteria around the US national women’s soccer team which crescendoed last weekend with the win in the World Cup final was hilarious on many levels. First of all, speaking purely as an outsider, it’s always adorable to see America getting worked up about soccer, a sport it deems to notice only once every four years and that only for the purposes of giving its grumbly baseball scribes something […] Read More
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Forced Loyalty is No Loyalty
When arguing politics with “real” Americans (a lot of them assume I am less than real somehow, but let’s leave this for another day), I often get this: “Hey, why do you want America to resemble your own country?” Come to think of it, a lot of fellow Russian Americans, most of whom are about 20 miles to the right of Ted Cruz on the ole political spectrum, ask me […] Read More
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For Shame, Comrade!
It’s time for the second part of my Russian cultural “likbez” (a Soviet term which means “liquidation of illiteracy”… everything in the USSR was a liquidation of something… someone… many things… we lived in a cheerful country): the different terms in the Russian language for degrees of drunkenness. See Part 1: To the Brotherhood of Nations This by no means exhaustive list will be done in the ascending order: from […] Read More
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