Communism Survivor: From Kiev to American Patriot

Victoria has 150,000 followers on Instagram and has been banned three times. She runs Communism Survivor, a page built on saying things that have somehow become controversial to say out loud — "communism is bad and leads to bad things," for example.

Polina and Yelena talk with Victoria about growing up in Kiev under the USSR (Polina was born in Minsk), why she started the account after giving up on arguing politics on Facebook, the KGB defector's four-step model for how a country gets taken apart from the inside, and why she — like her hosts — puts being American ahead of everything else, including her birth country. Also: a Netflix show that left one of their husbands speechless, and the podcast they can't stop talking about.

In this episode (approximate timestamps)

• 00:01 — Intro: meet Victoria and her page, Communism Survivor
• 02:10 — Why speaking plainly about communism gets you banned now
• 04:29 — Netflix's Adolescence: "one of the most disturbing shows I've seen"
• 05:44 — Victoria's story: born in Kiev, left the USSR at 10
• 08:09 — Landing in a Soviet immigrant enclave in Chicago, then the suburbs
• 10:33 — "We won the lottery" — immigrant gratitude vs. Western privilege
• 12:49 — The decades-long Soviet campaign to shape US colleges and media
• 15:06 — Communism as religion: why the campus mindset survives
• 17:29 — The "everyone's an artist" problem — communism vs. human nature
• 19:50 — Yuri Bezmenov's four-stage KGB playbook, and which stage we're in now
• ~24:00 — How Communism Survivor actually grew: the Facebook-argument origin story, the red-and-yellow branding decision, and the biggest mistake she sees new accounts make
• ~31:00 — Banned three times, building backup accounts, and why she thinks Instagram is targeting her
• ~33:00 — Antisemitism on the left and the right, and her father's theory on Holocaust cycles
• ~40:00 — On Zelensky, Ukraine aid, and why she doesn't feel conflicted supporting Trump despite her Ukrainian roots
• ~48:00 — Why she believes Putin isn't actually hurting from sanctions
• 50:27 — Her other job: integrative nutrition, and how she gets clients to change one habit at a time

Follow Victoria on Instagram @communismsurvivor