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And Mr. Satinsky, is it okay if we also record a Zoom call? It's just insurance basically... Hey Slavic Connexion listeners, it's Nick and Misha. Today we had the great pleasure of talking to Daniel Satinsky about his most recent book, Creating the Post-Soviet Russian Market Economy Through American Eyes.

Mr. Satinsky is an attorney, business consultant, and independent scholar. He has been to Soviet Union and Russia multiple times. And he has a very rich base of experiences.

So please take a listen. It's not typical Texas like this. You're listening to The Slavic Connection.

Brought to you by the Center for Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies and the William P. Clinton Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. All right, well, welcome Mr. Satinsky to The Slavic Connexion. Oh, thank you. 

Thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Yeah, and I'd just like to start off with kind of an easy but hard question.

What were you thinking when you wrote this book? What did you envision as maybe the purpose of writing about, you know, the 1990s, which, you know, for at least my generation, I was a baby. So I don't remember, but... Sure, sure, sure. Well, first of all, it was an important part of my life.

So a lot of this book tracks my own experiences and my own interest in Russia. And even in those days, it was difficult to get people to pay attention. You know, you'd come back from a trip and people would go, how was Russia? And any more than a sentence or two, their eyes would start to glaze over and you'd lose them.

But there was a really important historical process going on. And most of us who were part of it recognized it as an important historical process. And it was a unique period in time.

It was a time in which Russians and Americans mixed in numbers that had never before occurred and certainly changed dramatically in our times as well. So there was this interchange of Americans and Russians, which we learned about each other, and which has an informative impact on bigger events that were to follow. And without recording the experience of people who went through that, the feeling of that period would be lost.

It would be not understood in the way that we experienced it. And it was that experience that I wanted to capture with the book and to use the interview format to base the book upon. Yeah, I really loved the interview format because it captures all of these unique experiences but blends them all together in this narrative that you don't get from maybe a traditional history that's looking at maybe more administrative sources or things like that.

How was the process? How many interviews do you think you did? How long did it take you? I mean, this is not an easy task. Right, right. Well, originally, I thought of this as a project that would be interviewing Americans.

And then I had Russian co-authors who were going to do the same with Russians. How did they perceive this period? And it quickly became clear that that would be a huge undertaking and much too big for one book. So around, I think, 2017, I kind of formulated the idea of the book and put it as a book proposal to Rutledge.

And at the time, I thought, well, based on people I already knew, I thought I can easily get 25 or 30 interviews. And I thought that would be really sufficient to give me the material for the book. Well, almost everyone I spoke to said, oh, no, you've got to speak to so-and-so and so-and-so.

And it just mushroomed. It exploded. So everyone wanted to talk about their experience.

And I found that many of them had the same experience I had, was that people hadn't listened. And now they were in a circumstance where they had an opportunity to tell their story. And they grabbed ahold of that opportunity.

Now, it's important also to know that the people I interviewed were people who liked Russia by and large, who enjoyed their time there, who felt they grew from it and learned things from it. I'm not sure they're the majority of Americans who were active then. I mean, people's kind of split in different parts.

There were people who were expats who lived in Russia who hated it, couldn't stand the food, never learned the language, got hardship pay, went to expat restaurants and hung out with other expats, and then went home and told everybody what a crazy experience it had been. The people I interviewed were people who built businesses, who integrated themselves into the society, who got a much deeper appreciation of Russian and Russian culture. And as such, they were eager to talk about this.

And so they led me from one to another person. And this expanded. Now, what also happened was COVID.

And I started my interviews not long before COVID hit. So nobody was going anywhere. And we all had time on our hands.

And I used Zoom to do my networking and recording of the interviews. And it was, in some ways, a lucky coincidence that it happened during that period. But it took a long time for me to complete all these interviews.

I mean, interviews would be anywhere from an hour to three hours. Some people I interviewed twice. It took a long time to arrange the interviews.

So I would say the whole process took me about four years to complete. And most of the interviews were also done prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. So that's an important aspect of this, because they were focused on an earlier period.

And, no, it just grew to over 100 interviews. I think 105 or 106. The problem with that number of interviews is I couldn't use everything.

The Routledge, who was my publisher, had given me a page limit and a word limit. And so I had to squeeze as much as I could into those pages and select carefully pieces of interviews that were much larger and much more detailed than I could include. And in the original draft, which I thought was the final draft, I left out the section on telecommunications.

And I wrote to the people who I had interviewed, and I said, thank you for your contributions, but I couldn't use everything. And I unfortunately had to leave some things out, including telecom. Well, I got a furious response from Stan Crampton, who was with US West at that period and who had been one of the people that introduced the mobile technologies through US West into Russia.

And he said, no, you can't, you cannot leave this out. You have to put something in about telecom. Otherwise, the picture isn't complete.

And so I went back to the publisher. They gave me a few more pages. I cut some things out, and we managed to squeeze it in.

But there are many, many other things that I couldn't include. There's a lot about AmCham, about other expat organizations, business organizations. I just didn't have room to cover.

And could you describe your personal experience in Russia? Because the book's subtitle is Through the American Eyes, so that also includes your eyes as the author. What was your perception of Russia in the 90s and beyond? Okay, my initial contact with Russia was in 1984. I'm an attorney by background and training.

And I got a flyer from Intourist, which was the Soviet tour agency, offering a trip to the Soviet Union for lawyers as a learning experience. It was, I think, for under $1,500, airfare included. So it was a group trip.

So I found a friend of mine who wanted to go. We went in 1984. It was not what I expected, and it was really interesting.

I went back with my wife in 1985 because she was jealous that she hadn't had a chance to see the place, at least. And so in 1984, we went to Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, and Minsk. And then in 1985, my wife and I went to Belize.

Well, we started with St. Petersburg, well, then Leningrad, Moscow, Belize, Tashkent, and Irkutsk, and then back to Moscow and went home. I began to take Russia seriously in 89, when I got tired of being a lawyer and went to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy to get a master's degree. And decided, at this point, Russia was beginning to open up.

I had to learn Russian as part of my degree requirement. So I went, again, through a Russian language program. And then I got a job as I was just graduating from Fletcher with one of the early then Soviet-American joint ventures.

And we were importing rare earth oxides into the U.S. for making cubic zirconium from yttrium oxide. This was before anybody really had this obsession with rare earths as battery material. And this just started off my involvement with Russia now.

And during the 90s, I traveled there in conjunction with several joint ventures. I never lived there. So at the height of the period that I was there, I traveled five, six times a year.

So I was, some years, I was spending like a third of my life there. And a lot in the provinces, less in Moscow. So when I went, I went to study Russian language then later in Yaroslavl.

And I remember the first thing that the, one of the people who met us at the airport said is, you have to understand that Russia is not Moscow. And so it was a, it's an important lesson. And it was one that sort of characterized a lot of my career in Russia, which was outside of Moscow and not in the provinces of Yaroslavl and Perm and in the Far East and elsewhere.

I'm not sure that I answered your question. Yes, 100 percent. Yeah, that's, that's an incredible story.

And, you know, I know that it's, there's a common theme among a lot of these, you know, you call them expats, but Americans going to Russia, that they kind of, they get hooked almost, that they become interested and then it kind of pulls them in. But to kind of get into something very interesting that I really had not even read about or heard about very much was this citizen diplomacy movement. Could you talk a little bit about that and the space bridges and the involvement of the Esalen Institute and the human potential movement? Because when those things came up, I was like, it was a little bit difficult for me to find the connections.

I was like, oh my, wow, this is, these are some unlikely bedfellows. Right, right. Well, look, if you put yourself back in this period, it was the height of the Cold War.

There was a real threat of nuclear exchange. And the United States had just come out of the Vietnam War not long ago. And there were fairly strong peace organizations or independent organizations that were, I guess what we would call civil society, that were non-governmental organizations of some strength that came out of that period.

And people in America were concerned about how to prevent there being a nuclear exchange. So there was that kind of underlying motivation to try to understand. Well, and there was then the then the sort of assumption was, well, only if we only understood each other better, we would be able to get along and defuse this threat of a nuclear exchange.

Now, in my book, it really begins with the Esalen Institute, because what you have to understand about that period, and I think it may be important for understanding the future as well, is that the contacts between Americans and Russians were people who were considered marginal by the larger society. Weirdos or not, you know, in the mainstream. So the original contact between Esalen and the Russian Academy of Sciences was because Esalen was looking at parapsychology, telepathy, auras, these things which are kind of new agey, you know, research.

And they learned that the Soviets were also interested in the same. And the Soviets were considering this as research into human potential. They want to understand human potential.

So they were holding a conference about this in Tbilisi. And I think 1979, Esalen Institute sent two people there, Jim Hickman and his girlfriend at the time, whose name escapes me right now. And Hickman came back and said, well, you know, look, we have to establish regular contact with these people.

And so Esalen put together an institute for these exchanges with the Soviet Union. And Hickman became the executive director of it. And they began inviting people to go back and forth and conducting experiments, you know, with telepathy and so on.

And then the next milestone in this was the US Festival, which Steve Wozniak organized. And it was, believe it, we'll have to double check this, but I think it was 1982. And it was a big rock and roll festival in a stadium with big screens.

And they were planning it and they kind of go, kind of in this kind of brainstorming, I don't know what you would call it, and said, wow, what if we hooked up the Soviet Union to this? And wouldn't that be cool? And they knew that Hickman was the gateway to that because he had had already these exchanges and going back and forth. And he was in the middle of a project to form an association of American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts. It was supposed to be an organization of people who had gone into space.

And he was traveling with the American astronaut Rusty Spiker to go to Russia for that project. And so he then was charged with, well, look, see if you can set up some kind of space bridge. And, you know, in conjunction with many other people, not through just him alone, but they set up the first one.

And the Soviet Gus Teleradio, the state television radio, set up a studio in Moscow. And they wanted to use this new technology of space communications to do a simultaneous broadcast between the US festival and their studio in Moscow. So it was set up. 

The Russians had, you know, young Russians and Russian rock and roll bands in the studio. And in California, all of a sudden, here comes an intermission between a couple of bands. Here comes a screen with Moscow.

And Bill Graham, who was a famous music producer whose family was Hungarian, I believe. He saw this on the screen and he said, this is fake. This is this can't be true.

They're in us. They're in this Russian embassy in Washington. This is not from Moscow. 

And so he pulled the plug on the transmission. And the people in California called Hickman, who was in Moscow with the Russians, and said, we don't want to do. Graham just pulled the plug.

And Jim said, well, the Russians don't know. So let's just keep going with it. And so they then followed up the next year with another US festival.

And it was much more extensive. And the people who were involved with that technologically then went on to set up a whole series of space bridges that took place in the 1980s. Sort of under the same notion that if we understood each other better, we wouldn't want to kill each other.

And these exchanges sort of began and then grew. So they grew into a series of at one point that was on ABC News and on Nightline and at night. And they had Peter Jennings, who was the most famous anchor of that time, was on the U.S. side.

And then, oh my, I forget, the famous Russian TV anchor was on the other side. And they had members of the U.S. Congress and the Senate who were participating with members of the Soviet Supreme, the Supreme Soviet. And they were discussing things like the environment and the third world and, you know, possible conflict between the two countries.

And millions of people were watching this in the Soviet Union. And, you know, some it was on mainstream news. It's inconceivable that such a thing would happen in the United States now.

But it was it was a phenomenon. And it was something that, as you said, when you introduced it, many people don't even know that it happened. But it was an important aspect of citizen diplomacy that took place outside of government to government contact in that period of time.

And why was that citizen diplomacy so kind of active? Because two societies were basically taught to hate each other for almost 70 years. And there was animosity towards communists in the U.S., towards Westerners in the USSR. But nevertheless, those bridges, TV bridges, like you were talking about, they existed.

So what kind of spurred that and kept people going? I think on the U.S. side, as I said, there was genuine fear of nuclear exchange, that there was a set of Americans who did not want a nuclear war. And so so they had physicians for social responsibility. You had a number of organizations like that who were fostering and supporting this kind of a dialogue.

On the Russian side, I think it was less about peace and more about curiosity about, you know, the America. And among some people, there was a beginning sense that they were behind and they wanted to get access to technology. So this space bridge was technology enabled.

And there was a lot of technology exchange that went on around it. And so I'll give you another example of this process. There was an American, Joel Schatz, who was interested in peace.

And his wife was at a project to do a coloring book for peace. And he wrote to the Soviet embassy in the U.S. and said, can you give me a visa? He got a visa. He and his wife went on the way to the airport.

He buys a RadioShack computer, one of those early RadioShack computers, and takes it with him. Well, just so he meets with people in the Russian Academy of Sciences through contacts that Esalen established for him. And they were very interested in those computers because there were no personal computers in Russia at that time, in the Soviet Union, not Russia.

And they were very interested in technology exchange. So Joel was interested in peace. They were interested in technology exchange.

And the relationship for two different purposes grew in common and ended up with the first Internet connections between the United States and the Soviet Union. And SovAnTeleport, which Joel founded, was the first email and Internet connection between the two countries. Again, very different objectives on each side, but they found a common sort of activity that expressed both of those objectives.

Kind of speaking to maybe the maybe disorganized or bottom up way that a lot of this ended up being organized. You write about the Peace Corps and how the Peace Corps used volunteers. But how different these volunteers were from so usually Peace Corps volunteers being, you know, in their 20s and kind of young.

But these people who are going and maybe this is in the already into kind of the post-Soviet era. But these volunteers, these business experts and things kind of being dropped into the country. What was this process like? What are these? It seems very strange to me that, you know, the USAID and the Peace Corps and things were allowing the like their their people to go out without any sort of guidance.

Yeah. Well, the story, as I understand it, was that James Baker, who was Bush's secretary of state, went over to Russia soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union and promised aid to Yeltsin. And promised technical aid as to how to build a market economy.

So comes back to Washington and discovers that there's no real means of doing that, that the there's no experience with that. And the only the most experience that that you had was in the Peace Corps. And at least it had an administrative apparatus and a way of operation.

And so he went to the Peace Corps and said, you know, we need help and we need to send Americans there as technical experts about how to build a market economy. And so they placed ads in newspapers for people who had business skills. So it wasn't just well-meaning volunteers who went to teach literacy or English language or how to dig a well.

These were people that were sought for business skills. So the original group, there were 50 that were sent to the lower Volga region and 50 that were sent to the far east. And they got a real rapid education in Russian, like maybe six weeks of Russian.

And then they were sort of established and distributed to different factories and cities. And this was something that was decided at the top between the Russian government of Yeltsin and the American government. But the regional governments had no idea what these people were doing, why they were there.

And they, you know, had their own views of what they were doing. And one of the people who was one of the original Peace Corps guys told me that they were sort of the vanguard of capitalism, bringing capitalism. And they were supposed to have housing provided by the local hosts.

And they received a stipend that was equivalent to the local wages. And for many of them, it was barely enough to live on. And they were kind of left on their own.

There was an interesting story. One of them told me about being he was in Vladivostok in the Russian Far East, and he was living in a dormitory there. And he had a stipend, and all he could do was go to the local stores, which had nothing on the shelves, and buy things that he didn't know how to cook.

And it was a very difficult existence for him. And he was really depressed about it because he didn't really know, what am I doing here? What am I supposed to be accomplishing? And he told a story about being in the hallway, sort of in the stairwell, moping and kind of looking downcast. And a Russian woman who was sort of part of the program came up to him and said, listen, you Americans will never stick it out.

You're just too weak. You're too weak to cope with a Russian reality. And the irony is, this guy still was there until the Ukrainian invasion of Ukraine.

And the woman immigrated to the U.S. when she got married.

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