I thought we would start off talking a bit about your background, your education, how you became involved in work in the former Soviet space—initially Soviet space.

Yes, right, okay. I’m a child of the Cold War and my earliest memories from grade school are that we had drills where if there was an atomic bomb exploded in our school yard, we were supposed to get under a desk and hold our hands over the back of our necks so that flying glass shards wouldn’t cut us, which was completely absurd. But it formed an almost elemental fear, but interest, in what was this Soviet Union.

I’ll jump ahead to that I am a graduate of Northeastern [University] Law School. I became a practicing lawyer and I was working in the area of tax-financed affordable housing for community development corporations. But then suddenly in my mailbox, and I’ll never know exactly why, in 1983, probably, or ’83 or ’84, I got a flyer from Intourist, the Russian tour agency, that offered a study tour for lawyers to go to the Soviet Union. I think it was less than 1,500 dollars and included airfare, accommodations, and a visit to Moscow, Leningrad, Minsk, and Kyiv.

Since I had this interest in the Cold War—what is this place—I decided to go. It wasn’t that much money and I recruited a friend of mine to go with me. So, the two of us, off we went with this delegation in 1984. We toured around all of these cities and I know Intourist had a pretty set agenda. The agenda included mostly going to churches and historical sites. At some point, we said we’ve seen enough churches, drop us off at the war museum, because we wanted to see more about World War II and the Great Patriotic War and stuff like that. We sort of veered a little off the beaten path, but clearly you couldn’t veer off [too far]. There was a guide; they monitored what you were doing.

I remember one incident where somebody left their wallet in their hotel room and within three minutes, somebody had brought it down. It was clear that we weren’t anonymously floating through the Soviet Union. Although there were episodes—there was some guy who was a mayor of a town here in Massachusetts that made this three o’clock-in-the-morning rendezvous with some people he met in a hotel bar to exchange jeans for a rabbit hat, or some other memorabilia, or something.

When we came back [to Boston], we did a slideshow for our friends about the country. I remember distinctly saying that there were two impressions that we came back with. One is that, before we went, we thought of the Soviet Union having no colors—everything was in black and white. As weird as that sounds, it was shocking to see—oh, there are lots of colors here. It’s not black and white and all the women didn’t look like they were babushkas with the head wraps. The stereotype began to erode just from practical experience. It seemed so interesting that my wife then became interested in going in 1985. Again, we went on an Intourist trip that went to Moscow; Leningrad; Tbilisi, Georgia; Tashkent, Uzbekistan [0:05:00], and Irkutsk, to see Lake Baikal. This was sort of an introduction to the country in a really broad way beyond Moscow and then Leningrad.

It fostered this interest of mine, and I became disillusioned—or not disillusioned, I’d say bored is the right word, with the legal work I was doing. Just preparing condominium documents and financing statements and things like that. So, I decided that I would go back to school and get a master’s degree at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy [at Tufts University]. And for whatever reason, they let me in, I have no idea. But I went there, and one of the prerequisites was you had to have a foreign language; you had to have competency in a foreign language. I had no foreign language. I spoke English and I had taken French in high school and I had remembered almost none of it.

I had to decide what I was going to do. I decided that given this experience [traveling to the Soviet Union], and the beginnings of change in the Soviet Union, that that’s what I would focus on. So, I had to start with learning Russian. While I was at Fletcher I actually went to a Berlitz course to start and then I signed up for a language course through Intourist again. That was in the winter of 1988-89 in Leningrad at the Hotel Pulkovo, and there were ten or twelve of us. I do remember the New Year’s greeting given by Gorbachev. We had dinner in the hotel, and they broadcast—the Soviet leaders always gave an address at midnight of the new year—greetings to the country and their best wishes for the new year, and it was sort of flowery in language and so on. And Gorbachev was the general secretary, so he gave that greeting, I remember hearing it.

And then we actually went out from the hotel, and in the street there were concerts, there were food tents, lots of stuff going on. We had been drinking in the hotel and I was with two guys who—I think they were [U.S.] military guys and who were learning Russian. Somehow, we ended up in someone’s apartment at three in the morning having goose. I still have no idea how we got there, but it sort of became a standard experience in Russia that things happened and you kind of go with the flow. It wasn’t as crazy as it might sound, but it was sort of what happened. Then we ended up staying up all night because the metro was closed so we had to stay up until six in the morning.

But it was an exposure to Russia that at least we began to be able to have contact with real people. In Intourist, you couldn’t; it was managed, you could not have a free conversation with people, they were managed conversations. You could see buildings and museums and so on, but that was changing by ’88, ’89. Although some of the people we met, I remember meeting people that said, particularly women would say—“I won’t go to the hotel because hotels have a bad reputation; that it’s a place where criminal activity and prostitution take place, and I wouldn’t be seen in one of those Intourist hotels.” It was a perception among the general population that these were sort of places to be avoided, which we had no idea anyway.

I began to learn some Russian proverbs and a few ways of speaking, enough so that I was able to pass the competency exam and graduate from Fletcher. Do you want me to go on to my next experience being there, while I was at Fletcher, which is Vladivostok? [0:10:00]

Sure.

Again, we’re still talking about Soviet times. Perestroika is going on and there is increasing exchange with Americans. At the Fletcher School there was a professor, his name was John Curtis Perry, who had developed a program in North Pacific studies. He had a series of seminars where he took people every year to a different North Pacific city. The year I was there, he had developed a relation with the Soviet Peace Committee and they wanted to do the seminar in Vladivostok. Vladivostok—again, major military base for the Soviet Union in the North Pacific. It had been a closed city.[efn_note]The Soviet Union had many cities that were “closed” to visitation by foreigners and restricted for non-local Soviet citizens, commonly when the city was the site of classified military or research facilities.[/efn_note] We prepared this seminar, we prepared papers, and we flew to Moscow and then we were told—you can’t go to Vladivostok, it’s a closed city. Then there were these intense negotiations with the Soviet Peace Committee and others and, somehow, we flew. We flew from Moscow to Vladivostok; it was a nine-hour flight. One of the weird memories is of a woman getting on that flight with a German shepherd. The dog sat in the seat in front of me and I remember it with its paws over the seat looking at me. The dog then slept for most of it in the aisle but if you wanted to go to the bathroom, you had to carefully jump over this dog. The rules of life were very different.

In any event, we went to Vladivostok. There was a local committee there who met us, of local people, and we had this seminar which was to discuss different social problems and different things that people wrote papers about. But it was also a social program. We met in this marble dacha outside of the city, which is where, I think, Gerald Ford met with Brezhnev. We were staying in this sort of remote area.

Then we were able to tour the city, which was a huge, big thing, because other [foreign] people weren’t. [We were] some of the first Americans to be in that city. There were Russian academics who came from Moscow with us and I made friends with some of them, one of whom is a good friend of mine to this day and we have written a number of articles together on mostly oil and gas topics. He ended up becoming first a journalist and then a financial analyst, and then now head of the contract structuring of Gazprom Export.

But in any event, it goes back to those days of Vladivostok, and it was the first time I had seen the Pacific Ocean, I think, was in Vladivostok. I’m not sure what more to say about that but that was before I graduated from Fletcher.

Around the same time, still while we were at Fletcher, one of the Fletcher professors had a seminar program about how to operate in business in countries with blocked currencies. The ruble was not convertible. And so, I went to this presentation and one of the speakers was a guy named Arnold [E.] Freedman, who told the story about how he had a concert tour in the Soviet Union, been paid in rubles, he thought that it was going to [be exchangeable]. There was a Smith Barney, I can’t remember, one of the brokerage houses had a blocked currency program where they would accept currencies and then give you dollars, [but] they went out of business. They failed as a business; it was one of the big investment houses, I might remember it later.

But so, he was stuck [0:15:00] with all these rubles and he told the story of what he was doing with them to turn them into dollars, which I’ll tell you in a minute. I went up to him afterwards and I said, “I’m interested in getting a job with some company that’s working in Russia. Do you know anybody that might be hiring?” And he said, “Yes, me.” And he just basically hired me on the spot. His only question was whether I had any problem with drinking, because he was a recovering alcoholic and he knew that within Russia, at that time, drinking was an issue, and so he wanted to make sure that he wasn’t bringing on someone with whom that would be a problem. Once I passed that test, I joined him and I worked with him in his company; it was called AJ Ventures.

AJ Ventures was a company that—the “A” was Arnold Friedman and the “J” was Jim Hickman. The two of them had met each other through the music business. Arnold had been a music promoter, and he met Jim because Jim also was involved with citizen diplomacy and had been instrumental in a Billy Joel concert in the Soviet Union, and, somehow, they met through that. Arnold had taken a tour of the Beaver Brown Band, which was a Rhode Island-based rock-and-roll band, taken them through the Soviet Union, been paid in rubles, and had tried to use this blocked currency account mechanism. It failed and he was stuck having paid out the money to take them there, and with his expenses, and he had a whole bunch of rubles and he didn’t know what to do with it.

The two of them—and I don’t know how this became initiated—but they came up with a business which was, they used the rubles to purchase rare earth oxides from the Ministry of Atomic Energy of the Soviet Union [Minatom]. They were a by-product of some uranium mining that the ministry was doing. And rare earth oxides in those days were a fairly exotic kind of product. Now I think they’ve become really important in the technology industry and the Chinese have basically a chokehold on them.

But at those days, we were importing yttrium oxide, which is what you make cubic zirconium out of—the fake diamonds—and also it was used in some other kinds of industrial processes. I think it had something to do with computer screens, that it was important for that. But we had access to the whole range of rare earth oxides.

At that time, the business was Arnold in his living room and me with him in his living room and Jim in Moscow in an apartment with one Russian employee, Georgy [Zakharovich] Gluskin. We communicated through fax to import this yttrium oxide, and I remember that these are entrepreneurs, these two guys. Arnold knew almost nothing about chemistry. When I started working for him, I went and bought a chart of the periodic table so we could see what we were talking about and what other elements there were. Then we started doing research on lithium oxides and other of the rare earths, which—this was before electric cars became important and the batteries, so the lithium is a key element in the electric batteries for electric cars, and GM was just starting to experiment with them. We tried to get into GM with it, but we weren’t able to.

What happened was the rubles were all used up [buying the rare earth oxides that were imported to the U.S.], so [they] needed a source of new rubles because [0:20:00] currency [was] blocked [and you could not exchange dollars for rubles directly]. They took the profits from the business, went to Hong Kong, bought audio and video cassettes, imported them into the Russian Far East in Vladivostok and sold them for rubles, and then used those rubles to purchase more yttrium oxide. It was an elaborate currency conversion mechanism, which allowed us to get beyond the fact that the ruble wasn’t convertible, because we had a commodity that was of interest in the U.S. market.

It was a pretty interesting way to go about this. One of the other things I remember was how bad the communications were and the fact that the two of them trusted each other was really a key element of being able to even do this business at all. I can remember sitting with a fax machine, pushing the redial button for two hours, trying to get a fax through to our Moscow office, and that’s what the communications were like. There was no email; there was telex and fax, and that’s all there was.

That business was doing pretty well until the Chinese, who also [mine] rare earth oxides, their state enterprises decided that they would sell these same elements at a loss because for them the losses had no meaning. They had no economic incentive; they just wanted to get the hard currency and get in the world market. They pitched this stuff at a price that the Russians would not meet and so they developed really almost a virtual monopoly on rare earth oxides. The only mine in the U.S. that made them was closed, partly as a result of this competition. This is a background of an ongoing problem for the U.S. now of not having access to these high-tech materials. But we had an interesting vantage point on that. Once that happened, the business collapsed and we got out of that business and I stopped working for them because there was no way to pay me.

I then looked around for other opportunities and things to do. Although it may be hard to keep this stuff all straight, the interesting thing that I did other than that, at that period of time, had to do with Uzbekistan.

Before we move onto Uzbekistan, could you talk about how those relationships that AJ Ventures had with Minatom formed, that they were able to access these oxides in the first place?

Yes. Jim Hickman worked for Esalen Institute and he was involved with the citizen diplomacy in the ‘80s. And Esalen had exchange programs, and they brought Soviet—probably bureaucrats, because it would have had to be people who were trusted enough to let them out of the country. They formed, I don’t know, friendships, or at least contacts between them. As you know, everything in Russia is done through contacts, and you don’t deal with people you don’t know. That’s just a rule, which I violated and paid for myself, that rule. But that’s how Russians do things. I don’t know the specifics of this particular relationship, but I know it happened again in later work that I worked with Hickman and Friedman. It depended on having this prior experience with the citizen diplomacy era, and then as business became possible, the Russians or Soviets reached out to the people they know to figure out, well, what can we do? So how that specific relationship is, I’m not sure, but I’m certain it goes back to that prior experience of citizen diplomacy.

I’m wondering if you had any insight [0:25:00] into the dynamics within the ministry, as to their decision to make this sale beyond just this personal connection.

Unfortunately, I don’t know. I just don’t know. I was sort of parachuted into the business and not always completely aware of where that came from, so I don’t know.

But when it came down to it, they weren’t willing to drop the price so much that it would compete with it?

That’s right. They just weren’t willing to drop the price, and so therefore we couldn’t compete. So yes.

So—Uzbekistan.

Backtracking to my Fletcher experience, in Fletcher, you have to write a Master’s thesis. I wrote my Master’s thesis on Russian expansion into Central Asia. This was about the Russian [empire-building, which took place] when France and England were building their worldwide empires and dividing up Africa and Asia. The Russians were pushing into Central Asia in a parallel kind of process. When the revolution happened, the Bolsheviks and the Russian imperial government had a kind of contest over that same area; it was part of the Russian Civil War. And so anyway, I did a lot of research on that period and wrote about the emergence of the Soviet republics as part of the Soviet Union.

But I had never met an Uzbek before. In one of the meetings of the U.S.-Russia Chamber of Commerce, which actually was formed in 1989—again in Soviet times, we can talk about that more later—but they had made an announcement: We have a visitor from Uzbekistan! A guy named Bakhtiyor [Anvarovich] Islamov, who was studying at HIID [Harvard Institute for International Development] and he was there with somebody; I don’t know who brought him there. I walked up to him and I said, “Look, I wrote my thesis on Russian expansion into Central Asia and I’ve never met an Uzbek before. Will you come to my house for dinner?” He came to my house and we talked about what his research was. He was interested in urban planning and he was studying at Harvard. I said, “Well, that’s academics. I can give you an insight into how it’s really done, not just what these academics talk about.” Because my friend, who had gone to the Soviet Union with me in 1984, was a deputy director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority in their planning department.

I took him to Boston City Hall and we went to the map room where there was a model of the city. Tom [Thomas J. O’Malley] gave him this presentation about how planning was done in Boston, and he was enthralled with this. And he said, “Would you come to Tashkent and give this same presentation?” He said they could take care of all of our expenses if we got to Moscow. From Moscow to Tashkent and everything in between, but they couldn’t pay for an international airfare. We put together a team of, let’s see, there were five of us I think—yes, five of us—to put together a program. I actually have a copy of it here, it was called “Local Government in a Market Economy.” That’s the outline of the program. It was a three-day seminar on how local government works in a market economy. We paid our airfare and he made the arrangements with one of the deputy mayors of Tashkent. We flew to Moscow, and this was in the winter of 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union and immediately when Uzbekistan became an independent country. [0:30:00]

They were anxious for any kind of contacts, experience. We flew to Moscow, had dinner at the Uzbek Embassy, and then they flew us to Tashkent. I had been in Tashkent before because I had gone as a tourist, but nobody else had. There were three people from the Boston Redevelopment Authority, a law school professor friend of mine, and [me], the five of us. And then later they somehow attached this unknown person to our delegation who we always thought was a spy, but I don’t know who she really was [or even how she got attached to our delegation].

But we went to Tashkent, we gave the three-day seminar. There were five hundred people there from across Central Asia in an auditorium; they did simultaneous translation. I had a video camera with me; I videoed most of it and subsequently lost the video except for one tape that I have of it, but not of the seminar. The most interesting discussions were about taxation and how you collect taxes. Because remember, in the Soviet [times], taxation wasn’t part of how their system worked. They were amazed that we had this thing called a sales tax in which merchants collected money and then turned it over to the government. And they thought that that was the most ridiculous thing—if someone had money, why would they give it to the government?

I remember the guy who was head of planning [at the Boston Redevelopment Authority], John Abel. He said, “There’s three words that explain this: Internal Revenue Service. They will investigate you and put you in jail if you don’t pay over the money.” It was just a completely different frame of reference that we were all working in.

These guys were so hospitable. After the seminar, they took us in a little minibus and we went to Samarkand for a couple days, and then we went to Bukhara for some days, and then they took us to this ski resort outside of Tashkent, Shahira Azad [phonetic] or something like that. I don’t remember. And then they tried to come up with business deals that we could do together. They had access to some kind of empty building that they wanted to turn into a hotel, thought we could collaborate on it. Right after Uzbekistan became independent, [there was only a] black market for [hard] currency, no convertibility, and no prospect for it. This [was] way too early to be discussing any of these kinds of things and particularly with people who were there on their own as consultants. No real business came out of it, although we had hopes to continue this collaboration, which is why I formed B.E.A. Associates. Because out of this experience, I thought, well, maybe there’s business we could do, and I wanted to start a company as a legal vehicle to do that. B.E.A. was Boston-Europe-Asia Associates. I chose that name without putting Russia in it because the Uzbeks were clearly not interested in having anything to do with Russia at that point.

Actually, an interesting thing I forgot to mention about Vladivostok was that what I learned from that part of that experience was that the people in the Far East hated the people in Moscow. They didn’t want anything to do with them. They wanted to have the relationship with the Americans themselves, they resented Muscovites, they thought that they got everything, and privilege, and they got nothing, and they’d be better off separate, even. There was even some notion at that time of a separate country for Siberia.

There were constantly [0:35:00] changing sensibilities that you had to be aware of that bubbled up out of this period in which the Soviet Union was breaking up and whatever the relationships had been prior to that. And it’s worth noting that the people we dealt with [in Uzbekistan] were ethnic Uzbeks. On their team, they had one or two Russians. But mostly this was a period—and I saw this in other places, too—where the ethnic group that was officially designated as the leading group, but unofficially was subjugated to Moscow, suddenly had the freedom to be on their own. And they took the lead and pushed ethnic Russians to the side. That was also an interesting dynamic to watch.

The conversations that you had to have with your Uzbek counterparts about—this is a little bit too early; there are these larger structural issues that need to be worked out before we can go forward with a business venture—what were those discussions like?

Well, we didn’t have those discussions because we didn’t really understand. In this period, there was almost the notion that anything is possible. It’s like the world is changing; anything is possible. You would listen to these ideas and it would become a proposal, and then reality struck when you brought them home. I had a different experience, which I’ll tell you about, in Uglich, in Russia, which brought the same thing home to me. But [the Uzbeks referenced previously] had no notion of a business plan. There was never an economic analysis behind any of these ideas. It was just—look, we have an inside track, you go and find us a great partner, go and get Marriott or somebody, and we’ll put this together and it’ll be great. It was kind of like that.

It was only later when you’re away from that heady atmosphere that you begin to realize—now, wait a minute, if I’m really going to do this, what is it going to take and how is it going to really work. Because they had no idea how anything worked. It was just like, okay, everything’s possible now. And that really characterized the period. Just, everything is possible, and we now know each other. This idea of knowing each other is the key to a whole lot of other things that happened during this period. In the end, almost nothing came from this. I have no idea of the impact of this seminar. The guy, Shukhrat [phonetic], who was the deputy mayor [at the time and sponsor of our seminar], was within a year or so thrown out of office by a power struggle within the government in Tashkent. One of the guys [from his team] survived all these power struggles and he then, several years later, invited Tom and I to come back.

We came back and listened to more business proposals, which we couldn’t realize. His son, I think, now is one of the important people in the Central Bank of Uzbekistan, so they managed to navigate the times in terms of their family and so on. It’s only now that Uzbekistan is actually becoming a real place where you could do business. And under [former President of Uzbekistan Islam Abduganiyevich] Karimov, it was the cult of personality. I did have a later experience—and we can come back to this—of trying to do telecom business there in Tashkent, in Uzbekistan, which actually had a chance of success, but was undermined on the U.S. side, so it didn’t come to fruition. [0:40:00]

And the other tail end of this, which really leads into some of my experience in provincial Russia, in Yaroslavl, was that before this seminar, I had started to develop a working relationship with people in Yaroslavl. And because of that, we flew back to Moscow and then went to Yaroslavl and did the seminar in Yaroslavl.

The same seminar?

The same seminar. We did it in Yaroslavl to the regional government, not the city government, the regional government of Yaroslavl. To give you an idea of what the times were like at that time, we weren’t able to meet with the governor because he was in Ukraine bartering oil products for sugar. Because when the Soviet system fell apart, all the economic ties fell apart. Where the central government used to order things to go from one place to another, there was no one to order anything. And the place was desperately poor at that moment. This barter system developed, and particularly between [government officials] using old connections. That was how the government was trying to secure some level of standard of living for the population and to overcome the falling apart of the division of labor that had existed in the Soviet Union. When we went there—

And that, again, is right after the seminar, so it’s still in January of ’92?

January of 1992. And there was not a Xerox machine available in Yaroslavl. They were all under lock and key just to control communications. There was one restaurant that was at the Hotel Medved’, which was a hotel restaurant, and we went there for our meals. I remember our Russian friends saying, “Okay, it’s like seven o’clock, we have to be out of there because then it starts to fill up with soldiers and guys who are drinking and usually there are fights.” And particularly since we had several women with us, they would want to be dancing with the women, and so we needed to get out of there. There were no other choices. Frankly, Yaroslavl has changed so much, so quickly, but that was the atmosphere of the time.

I have to say that I think that we were—I don’t know if oblivious is the right word, but we didn’t quite grasp the depth of the economic problems they were dealing with. We were enraptured with the idea of this possibility of a new world. That they were going to construct something new, and we were going to contribute to that, and that the seminar was important things for them to learn in terms of how to reconstruct the county. But not really sufficiently appreciating what they were actually dealing with on a practical basis.

Did they seem similarly overwhelmed, or do you feel like they were perhaps keeping their understanding of how destructive this process had been of the cost to the Soviet Union and their economic problems close to the chest?

Yes. I think it was pretty much close to the chest. We should have observed it. The fact that the governor was off trying to barter. They have an oil refinery in Yaroslavl, and so they were taking and bartering refined oil products for food. The fact that they were doing that, we should have latched on to that more than we did. But it was clear that it was a very poor place. It was in tough shape. And I think they kept a lot of that to themselves. Actually, we had a lot of attention [0:45:00] to what we were discussing about city planning and taxation because they were also struggling with some of those problems as well. They didn’t know what to do, how to replace the mechanisms of central planning with market mechanisms. They didn’t know how to do that. They were used to having been directed from the center as to what to do. And so now they’re kind of on their own, and very much on their own, as they figured it out. That brought a lot of interest, I think, in what we were saying to them. Yes. It was part of the journey, I guess.

You had these seminars, and then that was still under the time—you had started B.E.A. at that point, how did that work progress as the now newly former-Soviet space is trying to restructure itself?

Yes, it did, but we were, if you will, entrepreneurs, and we were on our own. This was never an AID-funded[efn_note]United States Agency for International Development[/efn_note] or U.S. government-funded—we didn’t have funding from anybody for this. There was another set of people who were getting funded and who were doing other things, so they could do this consulting on a paying basis. One of my Russian friends always referred to this as “business tourism,” where people would get paid to come and consult and they would pull some consulting model off the shelf, get paid to go to Russia, give the presentation to an audience which sat there mutely or nodding their head, thinking that they were making a great impression and not making any impression at all, but collecting their fees.

There was a lot of this noncommunication during that period. I never could have made a business out of this; it didn’t work as a business. But then shortly thereafter, my old friends, Arnold and Jim, called me back and said, “We have a new business.” They said, “We’re in the telecom business now.” Okay, telecom business. What do we do?

The story of the telecom business was that the Soviet Union had tightly controlled international communications. As I remember this, there were four international lines that went through Moscow. If you wanted to make an international call, you had to arrange it through Moscow, place an order, get a line of one of those four, and then make your call. The Soviet Union comes apart and all the telecom companies want to get into Russia and set up their business, because it’s the largest market in Europe. At the same time, Russians were worried about foreigners taking over their communication system.

The [Russian] Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, which had been a Soviet organization of all the industries of the military industrial complex, took the step of saying, “How can we form a telecom company to capture foreign expertise but to keep it for ourselves so that we have a place in this space?” This is at the time when Sovam Teleport was founded, it was founded actually pre-Soviet times, but it was operating in Moscow, and there was another company called Comstar that was operating in Moscow. They were beginning to bring international communications into Moscow.

The Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, through a guy named Boris [Evgen’evich] Kurakin who had been [0:50:00] part of Licensintorg[efn_note]Also spelled Litsenzintorg.[/efn_note]—I don’t know if I’m saying that exactly right—but it was the Soviet leasing intellectual property organization [in charge of starting their telecom venture]. [REDACTED]

Boris knew Jim somehow. And they said, “Okay, let you guys have the access to foreigners, you can go out and get foreign telecom companies, and we have access to the whole regulatory regime in Russia. We’re a powerhouse.” And they were. “And we have chapters all around the country. Let’s form this joint venture and we’ll build an international telecommunications company.”

On the U.S. side, we formed International Business Communication Systems, IBCS, which was the successor, basically, to AJ Ventures, so it was owned by Jim and Arnold. I became their first employee, Jim was in Moscow and I was working out of Sharon, Massachusetts. Jim had Georgy Gluskin, who was a professional translator, as his staff [in Moscow]. We were the U.S. part and then there was the joint venture called Rustel, R-U-S-T-E-L, and it was formed in partnership with the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. Oddly, before we had started with the telecom business, they said, “Well, by the way, the first thing we’re going to do is we’ve got a humanitarian aid mission to Georgia.”

The reason for that was because when Georgia became independent, there was an extreme nationalist named [Zviad] Gamsakhurdia who became president and then there was uprising against him. [Eduard] Shevardnadze, who had been the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, was installed as the president as a result of this uprising. Shevardnadze knew Jim and some of Jim’s colleagues, and Georgia at this time was in crisis, desperately needing everything. They put together an aid shipment that was sent on—I think it was a Forbes plane—with the supplies coming from the Knights of Malta. There was a big Knights of Malta flag on the outside of the plane.

Anyway, so I flew to Tbilisi with Arnold, and then Jim, I think, either separately or I don’t know, he was there and the plane flew in and we brought in a journalist with us, a local journalist who filmed this and I think I told you, I have a film clip of this. We delivered medical supplies, a planeload of medical supplies, which were then very publicly loaded onto trucks, under guard so that they couldn’t be stolen or diverted, taken to a warehouse, which was also guarded, and then distributed to local pharmacies as humanitarian aid. At the same time, we were staying in the presidential residence, and we met with Shevardnadze—I have pictures of all this—and Tbilisi at that time was unbelievable. The buildings and all downtown were full of bullet holes and shot up because the two sides had been across the street from each other shooting weapons across the street. By the time we got there, there was a curfew on, and you could hear gunfire in the mountains, and you could see tracer bullets across in the mountains around Tbilisi. I remember we met with Shevardnadze, we talked about how Georgia needed international communications, and that we were forming this company and that we would try to bring international communications to Georgia to break its isolation.

We also had this bizarre meeting with the chief of police of Tbilisi, who took us to a restaurant under armed guard. We were the only ones in the restaurant—a huge spread [0:55:00] of alcohol and wine and food, and of course Jim and Arnold were both recovering alcoholics who refused to drink, which the guy couldn’t understand, but he kept drinking. It was a totally bizarre evening. He started doing magic tricks and he was pulling quarters out of people’s ears, and he was telling us that not only was he head of the police, but he controlled all the prostitution and drug trafficking in the city as well, and that he would be a great partner for us for our telecommunications business, which didn’t happen.

When we left there, it was after the curfew. I know this is a story I always tell, so I’ll tell it anyway. It was after the curfew. I had arranged for us to have a Georgian language translator, who I found through somebody I knew at Indiana University in the language program. This woman was driving [our] car, and in the front seat was an American lawyer, who had arranged the Forbes plane. I can’t remember his name. He was a member of the Knights of Malta, I think. And there was me in the back seat and some Russian staff member.

We’re going down the street and, all of a sudden, this Lada pulls out from nowhere and tells us to stop. We stop in the middle of this empty square. The guy gets out of his car and he holds his hands behind his back, where usually people carry their pistol. He walks to the [passenger’s] side and says in Georgian, “Get out.” And our driver [is] not getting out. She’s holding on to the wheel, she’s not moving. He’s screaming at her. The American lawyer in the front was saying to the guy in English—“do you know who you’re dealing with? We’re friends of the president. We’re on our way to the presidential residence.” His name was Paul [Dietrich]. I can’t remember his last name. The guy clearly didn’t understand anything. And I’m sitting in the back seat saying, “Okay, this is where it ends, right here. This guy is going to pull that gun out and we’re finished.” I said, “Paul, Paul, please, please just calm down, just don’t; stop yelling at him.” Which he finally did. The guy, once he realized that we weren’t going to get out of the car, he told us to stay right where we were because he was going to go get his colleagues. He jumps in his Lada, he couldn’t start it, he had to push it to jump start it. He goes in and takes off. As soon as he’s out of sight, we take off and go to the presidential compound, which was where we were staying. It was a crazy time.

Was there a connection between the fact that you had this meeting with the chief of police after the meeting with Shevardnadze?

With this? No. The only thing was that the chief of police provided an escort for Arnold and Jim because they were the important guys and they were in a different car. And we were the less important people and we just fell into this. This just was because there was a curfew and we weren’t supposed to be out.

I meant the very fact that you had this meeting with the chief of police, was—

I don’t think that triggered this stop. I don’t.

Oh, no, I don’t even mean the stop. I mean just did Shevardnadze give you over to the chief of police as the designated person with whom to deal with in terms of protocol?

No, I don’t have that impression. I’m not sure how it happened, though. I really don’t know. It’s a mystery. It’s an interesting question. As much as that night is imprinted in my memory, I’m not sure I know how it was we got that invitation. But in those times—we were foreigners. There weren’t a lot of foreigners around. There were not people there. It wasn’t common. Word got around. I’m sure there were communication channels that we were completely unaware of where everybody knew that—oh, wow, there are these people and they flew in with a plane. He might have independently decided, hey, let’s take a shot at this. But, a completely empty restaurant with a bunch of guys with Kalashnikovs outside guarding the restaurant and some more inside and us—yeah.

What came of those two meetings, if anything?

Later, as we [1:00:00] developed our business, I went again to Tbilisi, representing [Rustel]. What we learned was, of course, telecom is a regulated industry worldwide and so each country has its own monopoly on its telecommunications. Apparently Gamsakhurdia had sold the rights to the Georgian telecom bandwidth and space [links] to some gangster in New Jersey.[efn_note]The rights went to Joseph L. Schwartz and Easa Easa, owners of Long Island, N.Y.-based Videotel Think Tank Corporation. See details on the Georgian government’s lawsuit against Videotel here.[/efn_note] This person held the license. As a result—I stayed in the Marco Polo Hotel and to get an international line, it cost sixteen dollars a minute. I know this because [when] I was staying there, I called Arnold in Boston; he put me on hold because he was busy talking to someone else. I was on hold and then I talked to him, and when I checked out, there was a bill for five hundred dollars for my phone call, which I turned over to him, which was kind of a sticker shock.

This guy held the licenses and we couldn’t—at first, we thought we were going to be able to break through this. I went down there, I met with the Ministry of Communications people; this was an interesting experience as well. [At the initial meeting, they sat with] blank faces, not interested. But then they said, “Look, tonight we’re going to a christening, so why don’t you come with us.” Okay. They send a minibus, we go to this christening, which is several hundred people—in my memory, it was on the top of a garage or something outside of Tbilisi, and there was a tamada, who is a toastmaster. One of the things I had to learn is the differences in toasting between Georgia and Uzbekistan and Russia. Very different protocols and very important.

In Georgia, you do not make a toast. The tamada makes all the toasts. And there were two kids being christened. He drank a toast for each kid. There was a set of toasts, so it was a ram’s horn that he was drinking from. After about the fifth or sixth toast, and we were all sitting around these huge tables, eating, drinking Georgian wine, and eating food, I remember that I somehow got to him a little pin, an American flag pin, as a gesture. And he loved it. After another series of toasts—and only the men danced, by the way. There was music and only the men danced.

He and I were dancing on the roof of this place, amidst all of this craziness, and then we all went back to our hotel in a minibus. By that time, we were all [practically] blood brothers. The only thing we had in common, we couldn’t talk to each other—again, my Russian was still pretty primitive at that point—we were singing Beatles songs. I remember we sang Beatles songs the entire way back. The next day we had another meeting about telecom. They gave me the floorplans of the [Georgian] Interior Ministry and said, “Design us a telecom plan. We’ll buy it from you.” I was like, oh my god, I’ve got the blueprints for the Interior Ministry. I took them with me back to Moscow to our staff and said, “Okay, you got to design this and I don’t want anything more to do with this. I’m not taking these blueprints anywhere. They’re yours.”

But ultimately, we were blocked by this guy that held the rights. There was a long period of litigation against him. I don’t know how it ended up, but we were never able to do the business, even though we had the right connections, because of what had happened with Gamsakhurdia and the inability to overcome that blockage in Georgia. We had the right connections, but we couldn’t get the business.

So that was your company—they were litigating in U.S. court?

Yes. The [attorney], Paul, took this on as a crusade. He was part of some large law firm in [Washington] DC and they litigated it [1:05:00] on behalf of the Georgian government.

Their client was the Georgian government?

Yes.

Okay. So it wasn’t you.

It wasn’t us. But we would have been the beneficiary if they were able to spring it loose.

Do you remember the name of the New Jersey individual?

No, I don’t.

That’s probably all in public records.

Probably, yes. You can probably track that down. So that was part of the telecom experience. We enlisted European telecoms as our partners. From the beginning, there was a relationship with Dutch telecom, which, I don’t know how that came about. Our first public appearance of our company was at an expo in Moscow. This was between the first Georgia trip [for humanitarian aid] and the second Georgia trip [for business]. We had a mobile switching station that the Dutch telecom had, and we had that on display. But we really had a very poor understanding of how telecom worked. We didn’t really understand what we were doing. We were just being middlemen to bring in these Europeans. We realized the limits of what we had with the Dutch company. We did have [an] ongoing partnership with them and then we went to Germans. We tried to get Bosch, which made satellite earth stations, involved. Ultimately, we needed money, and so we raised our first round of money from Deutsche Bundespost Telekom.

They wanted into the Russian market badly. And at that point, they had some cultural problems getting into the Russian market. Not only the inherent suspicion [between] Russians and Germans, but they had a hard time getting along with Russians. For whatever reason, Americans got along with Russians a lot better. We had the same—anything goes; try things out. Germans were very structured. And our sense of humor was very much like the Russians’. Probably because a lot of our humor actually originated from there, and our comics and most of the famous comics of the ‘50s were Russian Jews—Milton Berle and people like that. They came from Odessa. That’s all the history of comedy. In any event, that’s a digression. Because we had the partnership with the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, the Deutsche Bundespost Telekom saw us as an entry point into that market.

I wrote our first business plan. We had to learn things like, how do you pay for telecom? We had no idea. We knew what a business plan should look like, but we had to—and I remember trying to decide what the demand would be. Where do you [find statistics about] the demand? We were focused from the beginning on being outside of Moscow and outside of St. Petersburg. First of all, there was strong competition there, and the other part was wide open. There was nobody in the provinces. I remember doing the research on the Russian oil and gas industry, find out where it was headquartered, and where were [the fields]. Because our guess was that if anybody had money to pay for communications, it was oil and gas. If we could go to the oil- and gas-producing regions, we could build our business of international telecommunications.

And based on actually having doing that is how we got funded from the Germans. We got, I think, close to a million dollars in that first round, which, for us, it was huge money. I remember identifying that there was oil and gas in Bashkortostan and in Ufa. There was a brochure or something for an oil and gas conference in Ufa. I convinced [our management] that we should be there. [1:10:00] I went to Moscow and then went to Ufa with one of our Russian staff, and we were the only foreigners at this event. We stayed in the hotel and I remember we talked to the management of the hotel [about how] we would put a business center into that hotel, put a satellite earth station on the roof, and they would then be able to have international communications independent of Moscow.

We basically got an agreement to do that and I believe that actually, later, one of our [in-country staff came back there and set up the business center]. As the company started expanding, we had people in Russia, many more people in Russia. We grew from being four people—two in the U.S. and two in Russia—to being about thirty-five in Sharon, outside of Boston, and 150 in Moscow. We grew pretty rapidly, and we absorbed in Russia a bunch of people who came from the Soviet Ministry of Telecom [USSR Ministry of Communications] who had been involved with the telecom industry. We sent an American to run our office there, who went there to live. He finished the deal in Ufa that I started. Then we later got installations in Krasnoyarsk and I believe in Tyumen. We had this strategy of moving outside Moscow and in getting funded by the Germans.

Once we got to a certain level, we needed more money and there was another business plan that, again, I wrote the market research and other people did the finances for it. We were funded by what was called TUSRIF, the U.S. Russia Investment Fund. It was a fund that was set up by Congress at the time, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was to fund business development in Russia. We got twenty million dollars from them.

But there were various problems in the company. I had a falling out with the founders and left the company in 1995. I think they were bankrupt by 1997; they were bankrupt. Some of it had to do with lack of technical expertise, and it grew too big. I think, initially, the founders had the idea that they would grow it to a certain size and then sell it out to a real telecom company. But then the more it grew, the more they thought, “Maybe we can make this into a real telecom company.” But they didn’t and couldn’t. If you spoke to them, they may have other reasons for why it failed. I wasn’t in the company at that time. I had left. We had a very promising opportunity and unfortunately it didn’t become one of the leading companies. It could have, but it didn’t.

This is the joint venture, right?

Yes, it was a joint venture.

To what extent—as you’re framing it as this opportunity in the region—Rustel is based in Moscow, right?

Yes.

What was that relationship like, or that dialogue, with convincing them to take this business out to the regions?

That was also somewhat part of their idea. [The Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs] had these local organizations in different parts of the country. So yes, they supported that idea. We had a board of directors, we had regular board meetings, we had—I remember one in Paris and one in Rome. It was sort of a way of rewarding the Russian board members—they get these free trips to Paris and Rome. And the board would approve our plans for expansion and stuff like that. [1:15:00] They were supportive of this.

Back to Uzbekistan—one of the trips I took was to Tashkent and I met with the local organization of the Uzbek Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. I met with [their top manager], I told him what we were doing. He then introduced me to the four leading hotels in Tashkent. I went to meet with all of them. I signed letters of intent with them to establish satellite earth station business centers. I took those letters back to Boston, gave them over to the person who had been hired to manage the company on an operational basis, and he ignored them.

This was sort of part of the problem I had with the company and part of the reason why I left. He had no experience in Russia. He knew nothing about Russia. He’d never been to Uzbekistan, and he was someone who was hired because he had corporate experience. I think he had been a Coke executive or something. [INTERRUPTION] [In my opinion,] he was completely out of his depth.

That was one of the outreaches that we did. Beyond the Ufa one, I also went to Novorossiysk, which is a major shipping port on the Black Sea. I was in Moscow, we were in one of our apartments, which was our office, and we received a message from the shipping company in Novorossiysk—“would you come and talk to us about satellite communications?” It was almost that brief. We had this conversation and Arnold said, “I don’t want to go.” And Jim said, “I don’t want to go.” And I said, “Well, I’ll go. Never been to Novorossiysk.” We said yes, we’ll be there. They said, “Fly to Krasnodar and look for a guy in a green Mercedes.”

I get on a plane, I fly to Krasnodar. Everybody disappears; it’s a small airport. And there’s a guy standing with a green Mercedes. Again, my Russian at that point was fairly primitive. He picks me up. I remember I had a Professor Longhair tape that we popped in the tape player. He loved it. We tootled along through the night to Novorossiysk. I made a presentation to [the shipping company manager] about what we could do. They needed international communications. We had very detailed discussions about this and that we were going to do a proposal for them.

Novorossiysk was a mess. It was a very rough place. I remember the hotel we stayed in, somebody said, “Oh, yeah, the night before some sailor had been shot in the hallway, down from where you’re staying,” this kind of stuff. That was one of the few times I actually [felt prejudice in Russia]. Somebody on the street called me a black monkey. It was a place where you had to be kind of careful. I remember we went to a restaurant and my instructions were—keep your eyes down, you’re going to walk to the bar, don’t look at any of those women in the eye because if you do, you’ll own them.

Okay, eyes down, we go in, we’re sitting at the restaurant, there’s [us] three guys. The waitress comes up and says, “What’s the matter with the three of you? You guys together—are you homosexuals or what?” So, the restaurant fills up and they bring in these two Greek ship captains with Russian women and the two couples sit like bookends around us. In the middle of the evening, the two women decide they didn’t like these guys and they swapped for a while. Then, one of them decided that they liked me and offered to come to Moscow and take care of me. It was just a bizarre place. There was this almost desperation. It was—not almost—it was desperate. I thought that we had this great opportunity with the shipping company.

As it turns out, he was engaged in what Russians called “marketing.” He wanted to know what he could get for what kind of money. All he was doing was gathering market intelligence about what we could offer. [1:20:00] He never was serious. While we thought we had this great opportunity, he was kind of playing us. I think that there was a lot of lack of understanding in business, and arrogance, generally, that this way of doing things I saw repeated in other circumstances and with other people. Where there was a style where a Russian would make you feel like you’re the most important person in the world. You’re getting special access and we’re going to do these great things together. In reality, their purpose was completely different than what you thought it was. Particularly in that period. It was one of the hazards of doing business with someone we didn’t know. We didn’t know this guy, there was no way to control his behavior or to appeal to anyone else. Basically, it became a waste. It was just a waste.

At what point did you find out that that was his strategy?

I think it took a month or two where I came back [to Moscow] and I said, “You’ve got to put this proposal together right away, get it to him.” We did that and then nothing happened, nothing happened, and then, somehow, someone in our company found out what he was really doing. He was an expert in telecom and he did know what he was asking, but he wasn’t serious about us. It was, again, an interesting experience about business in Russia in that period of time.

At that point is when you’re starting to leave this company and go on your own?

Yes. Right. So, what happens then? What I did was I partially fell back on, through a friend of mine, reigniting my legal career. Half of my time was spent working doing legal work. The other half was still trying to follow the dream of these Russia projects. I fell back on my contacts in Yaroslavl.

Going back a bit to explain how do I have contacts in Yaroslavl. Back when I was still in Fletcher, May of 1991, a delegation from Yaroslavl came to Boston. They were with an organization called MZhK. That was still Soviet times, but it was when the co-ops were forming, and they came here [to Boston] looking for business partners. They actually were selling, I think, electric cable and pipes. They came here, someone connected them to one of the city councilors, a guy named David Scondras[efn_note]If there is record of Scondras’ meeting with a Soviet delegation, it is likely to be found here.[/efn_note], who was the progressive city councilor, because he was interested in peace. They came in to talk to him, and he wanted to talk to them about peace, and they wanted to talk about business. It was a complete mismatch.

His deputy had served on a war committee with me, so he knew me. The best he could do was connect them to me. Then I met with them and I understood what it was that they were trying to do. There really was no market for what it was they were trying to do. But I met the people in the delegation, who later became both friends and colleagues. The woman who was the translator for them, Irina Novikova, was also teaching Russian to foreigners. I said, well, I don’t know about all these pipes and electrical wire, but I want to learn Russian better. She said okay, we’ll set up an immersion program in Yaroslavl for a month and you just bring a group.

I recruited a group of seven people and we went in July of 1991, before the Soviet Union collapsed, for a month in Yaroslavl with an immersion program in which I actually really began to learn to speak to Russian. I learned phrases [1:25:00] and sentences and communicating with people and they did a very good job. It was also forming friendships. I remember the bus ride from Moscow to Yaroslavl in which one of the staff people said, “The first thing you have to learn is that Moscow is not Russia. You have to learn Moscow is not Russia. We’re going to the real Russia, to the heartland.” Yaroslavl is older than Moscow. It’s more than a thousand years old. I actually attended the thousand-year anniversary in Yaroslavl, which was very cool. But as I indicated, it was desperately poor at this time. I stayed in what was loosely a hotel; I guess it was a hotel. Some of the other people stayed with families; I didn’t want to stay with [a family at that time].

It was probably a dorm.

Yes, it was a dorm. Yes, it was an obshchezhitie [dormitory]. But they called it the svechka [candle] because it was [like a] candlestick, it was [a] seven-story building, it was the biggest building in [downtown] Yaroslavl. It did have a hotel in the first floor, which was one of the first private hotels [in the city]. The people there became friends of mine and then when I did the seminar in Tashkent, I had made them aware of that and they said, “Well then, you have to come to Yaroslavl.” I had continued the contact with them and sometimes when I went to Moscow, when I was working in the telecom company, when I had weekends, I would go there on the weekend.

So, 1995 comes and Irina has this business that she’s built, called the InTC—International Training Center—which was teaching English to Russians, primarily, so that they could travel abroad and so on. She said, “Let’s figure out—maybe we can do some kind of business together.” Now having had this telecom experience and setting up business centers in different provinces, we thought, okay, we’ll set up a business center in Yaroslavl, in a hotel. There was the hotel, Iubileinaia, the Jubilee Hotel, which was a former Intourist hotel. She knew the manager and so we set up a new company, it was called InTC Service. It was formed in 1995. That was her, me, a lawyer named Vladimir Shalaev, who later became the lawyer for the Kontinental Hockey League, and a guy named Sasha Kegeles who had been one of the people who had been in Boston. We set up a business center in the hotel. No market research, just a sense that this was something, and that the hotel needed it—it had business travelers. [The hotel manager was enthusiastic and cooperative because he also thought the hotel needed a business center.] But in reality, most of them, their business was in Russia and they didn’t really need international communications.

But we did—I brought a computer there, I think in my suitcase, it was like the first computer [that anyone had seen in Yaroslavl]. I bought a fax machine and a computer. Irina had never seen a computer before. We started email so that we could communicate. Previous to that, it had only been by telex. This qualitatively changed the ability to relate and build this business.

At this period, in 1995, Russia was still recovering from the collapse of the Soviet Union. [Going to do business in] Yaroslavl was like going to Cincinnati in the middle of the Great Depression. It just really didn’t have much of an economic dynamic, unfortunately. There were a number of hotels and each one of those hotels was controlled by a different ethnic gangster group. Our hotel was controlled [1:30:00] by Chechens. They had these Jeep and Jeep-like vehicles outside and they were all over the hotel, but they had an agreement with the manager. I remember there was a café there, I went in one time to go to lunch, and they were watching videotapes of dog fights. I walked in and then walked back out. It was like—I’m not being there. We opened the business center and this very well-dressed young Chechen guy shows up at the door and says, “Who’s the owner?” I’m there and I come and he says, “Listen, I don’t know—if you don’t have krysha—” you know what krysha is, right?[efn_note]Krysha, which translates literally as “roof,” is commonly used to refer to the use of a criminal enterprise to provide protection to a company or organization in Russia in the 1990s.[/efn_note]

It’s the roof; the cover.

Yes, cover. “If you don’t have krysha, then I’m your partner.” So I said, “Okay, go talk to Sorokin,” —who was the manager of the hotel— “and Shalaev,” —who was the lawyer. And that’s the last time I ever saw the guy. We’re done; I had no Chechen partner. They ran that hotel for some number of years and then all of a sudden, they just went away. I don’t know, maybe it was a part of the process of the government reasserting control, whatever it was, that whole gangster period started to fade later in the ‘90s.

Yes. I’m wondering if it was after the Second [Chechen] War in the late ‘90s.

Could have been. It could have, yes, it could be that, because Chechens were definitely out of favor. And so whatever gangster activity they were involved in went to somebody else. So anyway, we tried that business. I didn’t expect that it would make a big living for me. That’s why I kept doing the legal work. But I thought it would bring some [income], and then I would learn more. We did reach out to the regional government. We created what was called a Yaroslavl White Pages, which was a business directory in English, which hadn’t existed before. While in theory the regional government kept saying, “Oh, we want investment, we want foreigners to come here,” nobody knew what was going on. There was no way of knowing what was going on in that region. We created this White Pages in partnership with the Yaroslavl Chamber of Commerce and I think the regional government bought three hundred copies of it and used it to distribute to people.

This was our first sort of “building bridges” with the industry in the region. Unfortunately, industry was still going through this serious adjustment. It was very difficult to build much on that. And foreigners weren’t coming to Yaroslavl.

But, at the same time, small business was exploding in Yaroslavl. There was a very active “Business for Russia” program. Russians traveled to the U.S. and to Vermont and around [the U.S.], gaining a lot of experience; a lot of them were starting small businesses. Flower shops, restaurants, electronic stores. It really saw a big transformation of the area, filling in of what was lost, which wasn’t present in Soviet times in terms of the diversity of the economy. Irina’s business was a part of that blossoming of small business. And some of those people are still in business. Many of them aren’t.

And I also remember during that same period, I was in Yaroslavl a lot. One of the partners, Sasha Kegeles, was an accountant. I remember he took me on a trip to Uglich to visit with the director of the Chaika factory. Now, Chaika was a brand name of watches, a watch company in Soviet times. It was the largest watch company in the Soviet Union. At that time, Uglich was a small town up the Volga, [1:35:00] outside of Yaroslavl. It had a population of 16,000. Ten thousand of them worked in the watch factory. It was also the site of where Ivan the Terrible killed his last son. You may know it for that.

We go and meet with this guy. The Soviet Union was gone by now and so he’s struggling to figure out how to make his enterprise competitive in this new market that he has to deal with, because he’s now got foreign competition with watches. He knows the watch business and he knows exactly what he needs in terms of the equipment he needs to buy to upgrade his production and make his watches competitive. We go and meet with him, and it’s one of these—middle of the day, and he pulls out the vodka, and we’re drinking—and because I was introduced to him through Kegeles, he’s open enough with me. Finally, I say, okay. He’s saying, “I need investment.” Okay—“You need a business plan. You’re not going to get any investment without a business plan.” He says, “I already have one. I looked up on the Internet a template for a business plan and I filled it out and here it is.”

I looked at it and it was complete garbage. What it was—and this was again typical of people in his position—they were used to receiving money, investment, from the central authorities. They knew how to receive and use money. But they did not have any way to measure economic return on that investment. I said to him, “What is the investor going to get?” He couldn’t answer that question. And I said, “Okay, I will prepare for you a real business plan and it will cost you—” I don’t know, I quoted him some ridiculous number, 2,500 dollars or something like that. “No way, I’m not doing that. I’ve got a business plan.” And so we went back and forth with that. I think I actually brought the garbage that he had and I showed it to some people in Boston who had the predictable laughing at me response, which was, “What do we get from this? Why should we do this?” And the answer was, nobody knew. It was part of the disconnect, I think, of some of these regional enterprises.

This guy, he knew the watch business and he was used to having a dominant position, but making the transition—he couldn’t do it. I believe they went bankrupt. I think they still make watches, but I’m not positive. On the other hand, the impression I had, the thing that really struck me was driving into the city and there are signs that say the name of the city and the year of the foundation. I think Uglich was founded in 965 or something like that.[efn_note]Local tradition dates Uglich back to 937.[/efn_note] And I said, 965, okay. They’ve lived through lots of worse hardships than this. They’ll survive somehow. I don’t know how, but they will. It’s just this sense of the weight of Russian history and their perception of things based on awareness of their own history. I think that was probably in his background, his way of thinking as well.

He was part of what people refer to as the “red directors.”[efn_note]”Red directors” commonly refers to individuals who ran major enterprises during Soviet times and then held the same position after the fall of the Soviet Union. You can read Anatoly Chubais’ take on the red directors here.[/efn_note] They were the people who ran these major enterprises. There was another one in Yaroslavl, it was called Yartekhuglorod. It was one of the four companies in the country that made carbon black, which is a major ingredient for car tires. There was Yartekhuglorod, which made carbon black, and then there was the Yaroslavl Shinnyi Zavod, which made tires. I was called into Yartekhuglorod because they had been exporting their carbon black and they sold it through a middleman, I think to Bridgestone Tires. The middleman had a contract to buy [1:40:00] four shipments of carbon black, each at I think 250,000 dollars apiece. They got the first one, they got paid. The second one, they got paid. The third one, they got paid. The fourth one, they shipped it, didn’t get paid.

So, 250,000 dollars is missing. The guy’s position is, well, the tax authority is going to assume that he had some backdoor deal and that that 250,000 dollars wasn’t paid to the enterprise but it was paid to his personal account somewhere in Switzerland or somewhere. Therefore, they were going to fine the enterprise double. They would get a five-hundred-thousand-dollar fee. Now, we went in—he and his brother ran this place like a fiefdom. He was yelling and screaming about this American who had cheated him. I remember him saying it was “too bad that Yaponchik is in jail, because I would take care of it that way.” Yaponchik was in jail, so he couldn’t.[efn_note]Yaponchik is the infamous Russian crime boss Vyacheslav Kirillovich Ivankov, who spent time incarcerated both the Soviet Union and, from 1995 to 2004, in the United States.[/efn_note]

We found where the guy was who had taken the money. He was in Arizona. I found a lawyer in Arizona to sue him on behalf of the Russian entity. The guy didn’t defend at all. He just boogied. [However, we] got jurisdiction over him. We got a judgement against him for the 250,000 dollars. With that judgment, the Russian company was able to say to the tax authority, “See, the money was stolen by this American, and I don’t have it.” He saved himself five hundred thousand dollars.

This was something I got paid to do. It’s part of how we were trying to figure out how to build this business, but there wasn’t enough of it. That was not a replicable business model. But it was part of the rough edges of the business, doing business with foreigners, and some of the foreigners were very dishonest. As much as people like to talk about how Russians either cheated or were dishonest, they were dealing with some pretty dishonest people who came from outside who were just fortune seekers as well. That was one example. Ultimately, it didn’t work; [there was not enough business for me to continue paying much attention to InTC Service]. That business, InTC Service, still exists. It’s still functioning, but it became mostly a translation service rather than a communications center, because communications grew. You didn’t need to go to a hotel business center to send an email because email became so prevalent. [INTERRUPTION]

I think there never was a very strong foreign [business] presence in Yaroslavl. I think that GE [General Electric] developed some collaboration in Rybinsk. Rybinsk was another closed city that had manufactured jet engines. It was a closed city. I remember going there with Irina early when we were studying Russian language and we had a meeting with small businesses, and we went around the room to say what they did.

There was a guy who said, “My business is I’m using magnets to heal people.” He had these devices that you put in your shoe. You had little magnets that you put in these inserts. Then he had a belt that you wore around your waist that had magnetic inserts; that was supposed to be a medical treatment. I remember he told me this and I almost burst out laughing, which really would have been bad form. I thought, oh, this is nuts. [1:45:00] Then I came home and I remember seeing an ad on TV for some golfing show about using magnets for medical treatment. It all turned out to be not quite as weird as I thought, but it never led to anything. You couldn’t import magnets.

The other thing that—again, it’s weird to do this but there’s a lot of “almost worked” things. There was a company in Yaroslavl that was growing [plant] cells in a vat. In other words, they could take a plant cell from a root and instead of growing the plant, they could grow the cells. Let me see if I can make that more understandable. The product was ginseng. Ginseng is, after cocaine, the most valuable agricultural product in the world. Mostly in Asia, but it’s a tonic that people take and so on. Anyway, it usually comes in the form of a root. What they were able to do is take the cells from a ginseng root and grow them in a vat so that you ended up with a powder—a powdered ginseng. It had a very predictable composition of active ingredient, and it was very stable, and it was safe. They wanted to sell this product in the U.S. I became acquainted with them through our business center. I took samples of the ginseng. I sent it to a laboratory in Colorado that does this analysis. They wrote back that it was a stable, safe compound at this level.

I recruited some business students from either Bentley [University] or, I don’t know, Babson [College] who did a case study for me on how to sell this stuff. What they concluded was that the traditional customers wouldn’t buy it, because they’re used to buying a root and they judged the value of it by looking at the root itself. Even though the quality varies from root to root, they only buy roots. This was in 1996 or 1997. They said the real market for this is as an additive to drinks. You could put this in drink form and it would be an energy boost. It would be an energy drink. I took the business plan, I went back to the Yaroslavl people. It was both Yaroslavl and Moscow. It was actually some Moscow guys at Izvestia who controlled the Yaroslavl guys.

They said, “Well, that’s interesting, but we don’t see the future of that. We just don’t see the future of this energy drink thing. And we have this other product called Alkasoft,” —which is something that they also brewed in a vat which allegedly can turn bad vodka into soft vodka and you wouldn’t have a hangover, so you could have the vodka of the twenty-first century. They decided to invest in that. They also had had some experiments with this ginseng as animal feed and it showed higher survivability for chicks and piglets after giving them this mixed in with their feed, so they went for that market. They said to me, “We won’t put anything into this, but if you want to, on your own, follow this up in the U.S., we’ll give you those rights.” At that point, I didn’t have any financial backing and, probably stupidly, I did not follow that. That was probably my best chance for a big success in Russia. And then later I couldn’t even find the guys, they kind of disappeared.

They were working for Izvestia? And they were somehow—

Izvestia [1:50:00] was invested in this as—

Oh, they were just an investor. Okay.

—an investor. They invested and controlled it, basically, because they were more sophisticated. It was an agricultural institute in Yaroslavl. To this day, I still wish I could find them, but I lost them and I have no idea what they did. The vodka of the twenty-first century I know for sure failed.

Yeah, we don’t have that. We would know.

Yeah.

So, you became involved in the U.S.-Russia Chamber of Commerce, the New England Chapter of the Chamber of Commerce, in 1998.

Yes. Actually, I became involved with it much earlier. I attended meetings. As I mentioned to you, there were a whole bunch of independent local chambers that were formed in this period. None of them were connected to each other except in informal ways. The U.S.-Russia Business Council was the organization in Washington, DC, which was made up of all the multinationals who were interested in Russia. It was primarily a lobbying organization. It was a top-level business contact organization. Around that, different regions had different chambers, usually formed for different reasons around individuals who started them and then they flourished based on whether there was real interest in business in Russia in the area or not.

There was one in Seattle; there was one in Denver; there was one in Chicago. There was one in Houston, I believe. One maybe in Atlanta. One in Philadelphia. And there are probably more that I wasn’t aware of. But the New England one was started by Gerry Wright, who was a peace activist who went to St. Petersburg, or then Leningrad. He was a runner and they had a marathon for peace or something. He participated in that and he came to the conclusion that the best way for peace between the Soviet Union and the U.S. was to have economic ties, because there were almost none.

As perestroika developed, he founded this chamber and it was called—it didn’t have the same name, it was the Massachusetts [East West Trade] Council. Then it became Boston-Russia Chamber of Commerce. We later changed it to [the U.S.-Russia Chamber of Commerce of] New England because Boston was too limited. Probably at the time I became involved was in the early ‘90s. That’s where I met Bakhtiyor Islamov. That’s how I went to Tashkent. I would go to meetings of the chamber depending on whether I was in town or not. I was an infrequent but constant participant.

In those days, there were a lot of business interests in Russia. The chamber would hold conferences and seminars and breakfasts. Often if there was a Russian delegation that came to town, they would hold a breakfast, and the delegation would speak and then people would mingle and they’d talk and try to figure out if there’s anything they can do together. I remember there were several of these conferences that were about—I can’t remember what we called them, sort of financial conferences, but they were about investments. We would have three hundred, four hundred people at these conferences. They were pretty large. I remember important companies would come, so we had 36,6, which is what became like the CVS of Russia. They came and talked about their company. At the same time, I think [1:55:00] Harvard was holding conferences where they had pretty high-level delegations.

I remember there was a delegation at a Harvard conference at this period in the ‘90s where Norilsk Nickel [Nornickel] came and it was at a time when they had just started listing their [ADRs—American depository receipts—as] an investment vehicle that was listed on the [New York] Stock Exchange. I went home and bought a bunch of it for pennies and it financed improvements on my house because it did very well. Anyway, because there was this level of interest and because there were actual practical activities, people were investing, people were starting businesses, the chamber was really a vibrant place. It grew to the point where it had a board rather than it being just Gerry Wright doing what he wanted to do. And the board chairman, Chris Senie[efn_note]An oral history interview with Christopher Senie is available in this archive.[/efn_note], who had been involved both in citizen diplomacy and then in business in Russia, was a chairman of the board. They decided they wanted a part-time director and he came to me and asked me if I would be that part-time director. By that time, I think I was offered a share of the dues money. The recordkeeping was a mess, that people weren’t paying them dues.

The activities were random and so I regularized the activities and dues collection and made some small amount of salary for myself by pushing the organization forward and trying to focus more on areas of real practical interaction. We began to focus more on the technology sector because that’s what Massachusetts has. We changed it from Boston to New England so that we could have a broader reach. By 2001-2002, we were bringing Russian technology companies to Massachusetts and developing this work through the chamber. But now we’re at the edge of this period.

When I was recruited to be the director, it was right before the August 1998 default. And when the Russian government defaulted, I remember there was a famous cover of The Atlantic. They had a picture, I think, of a Russian military—all of these guys formally looking to the right, and the cover says, “Russia Is Finished.”[efn_note]Click here to open the full text of the article in a new tab.[/efn_note] The expectation was Russia was collapsed. It was done. Wrong. It was a wrong assumption, but it’s an ahistorical assumption that was typical of how Americans have viewed Russia.

During that period, I remember I organized a seminar for Cabot Corporation, which was deciding whether to [get involved in the Russian market]. Cabot Corporation also makes carbon black. They were looking into going into the Russian market. They wanted a seminar for their top leadership to discuss Russia. I put this seminar together and had Marshall [Irwin] Goldman—this one was one I was doing as a private person, as B.E.A.—Marshall Goldman was part of the panel, who was at that time the leading expert on Russia. Marshall said, “I’m the Dr. Kevorkian of Russian studies.” He said, “I’ve predicted that the Soviet Union is going to fall apart for so many years and finally it has.” He was pretty candid about how negative he always was and that that was what his profession was and that’s what it always was.

[As part of the seminar,] I had George Marquart who had started Polaroid in Russia. He came and talked about that experience and urged Cabot to get into [2:00:00] the market. I had a senator from the Russian Duma who represented Yaroslavl, who also owned the Yaroslavl tire factory. He also urged them to get in. They were stuck on the health statistics. There was a guy in DC who had statistics on the demographic trends in Russia saying that the population was going to decline, the workforce would collapse because of falling birthrates and high rates of disease and HIV, and therefore, you shouldn’t do anything, because you wouldn’t have workers. Ultimately, Cabot, I think, took that route because that was easier and safer than jumping in. The Yaroslavl guy would have gone through hoops to get them connected, but they ultimately decided not to go that direction.

It was part of this tug of war in the corporate world over whether to go in or not to go in, and whether to look at this as an opportunity or as a tar pit. And what I witnessed over this time was that those companies that went into Russia and were there made money and stayed there. And those who didn’t have that experience wouldn’t—the newcomers wouldn’t go in. There was a real split in the business community over their attitude towards Russia as a prospective market. And what the RBC [U.S.-Russia Business Council] and the AmCham, the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia, found was all their members were happy, they were making money—despite all of the negative publicity that was going on here about the country. There was a real disconnect.

To what do you attribute that disconnect?

That’s a good question. First of all, you have the intellectuals of the Cold War period [who] were brought up on this idea of the negativity of Russia. Period. I think they never could change that opinion. It was from Sovietology and the Cold War. Academics always were trained to look at how bad things are. And then there are always emigres who would be willing to feed into that as well. There was a funny thing among Russians that they reveled in talking about all of these crazy bad things, even though they were in business themselves. I don’t think they understood the impact they were making on their people. Because for them, it was, “Ah, yes, this happens and that happens, but we go with it. We’re Russians, we’re tough, we make our business, and we’re fine.” But the “we’re fine” part never came through. It was always the glass is half empty. There was a whole variety of things plus whatever the politics were at that particular point. But in the early ‘90s, the politics were completely different. There was this notion we won the Cold War and Russia is going to be remade in our image and it’s going to join the world order on our terms. And that persisted through the Yeltsin years.

I don’t know if you remember or if you’ve seen the cover when Yeltsin won his second election. It’s on the cover of Time magazine and he’s holding an American flag and it’s like “Our Man in Russia.”[efn_note]The cover referred to reads in full “Yanks to the Rescue: The Secret Story of how American Advisers Helped Yeltsin Win” and can be seen by clicking here.[/efn_note] That wasn’t considered offensive or anything; it was just part of it. But there were always those who said, “It’s never [2:05:00] going to go anywhere. Russia is never going to go anywhere; it’s going to collapse. It’s not going to grow.” Real fortunes of Russia rose and fell on oil prices. In the ‘90s, oil prices were at historic lows and in some cases almost close to the cost of production. The country didn’t start recovering until oil prices started to recover. By that time, attitudes had formed which either led to increasing involvement or led to staying away. I don’t know if that is coherent enough.

You mentioned earlier about a reticence in Russia to a certain extent about foreigners coming in and setting up business due to the real phenomenon of some people simply coming in with a “bandit mentality.” And especially with the ‘96 reelection for Boris Yeltsin and his very publicized use of Western and American consultants, and the US attitude towards that election. Did you notice in either the companies you were working with, or in your work, or otherwise, any reticence resulting from that sort of renewed reticence, among Russian companies?

Yes. Two things I want to say about that. I told you that I made this friendship with this Russian expert in Vladivostok; we remain friends ‘til today. We always had these conversations about the oil and gas industry and the integration of oil and gas into the world economy. He always insisted with me that Russia would never allow foreigners to control their oil and gas industry. That that was this patrimony of the country, and they would never allow it. Even though everybody talked about [integration with the world market], and then there were joint ventures with Lukoil, and of course [Mikhail Borisovich] Khodorkovsky wanted to have a joint venture with ExxonMobil. And he said, never going to happen. Because the Russians won’t allow foreigners to take that resource. He said, “We haven’t finished dividing it up among ourselves yet, and when that happens, then it’ll settle down.”

Where foreigners made the most inroads were in industries that didn’t exist in the Soviet times. You had movie theaters. You had some commercial real estate office space. It filled gaps where there was none, so Class A office space didn’t exist in the Soviet Union. You had video rental stores, restaurants, to a certain extent telecom, and a lot of retail consumer goods that either Westerners or Russians filled those gaps. But in the essential industries, Russians held on to that and didn’t want to let foreigners control it. Always, I would hear people say, “Why should we let you come to our country and make money and take it out of our country? Why should we do that? Why should we let you make money off of us?” I would hear that often.

I think that while there were a lot in the intelligentsia and even some of the government elite who were interested in American advice and in new institutions, by the end of the ‘90s they were maybe—and I don’t know exactly where exactly this tipping point was—I heard people start saying, “Stop telling us how to live.” And they didn’t like the “big brother” attitude that they got from Americans. That they had failed, they were the losers, and suck it up, live like us, and be [2:10:00] the junior partners. This just offended them.

As their oil revenues increased, and as Russians traveled abroad and got business skills themselves, they gradually came to the conclusion that they could do these things themselves and that the forms of economic activity would be Russified and not necessarily the same as they were in the West, and that was okay. Some of the craziness of the early ‘90s was pushed aside. I don’t know if that makes sense.

Yes, absolutely. How would you describe the development of Western willingness and success in doing business regionally throughout Russia, as opposed to just in Moscow, throughout the ‘90s?

Okay. That’s a big a subject.

Maybe too big.

One aspect of it was that many of the technology companies recognized there were significant intellectual resources in Russia. In the ‘90s, Intel had a development center in Novosibirsk that they founded to take advantage of the math expertise of the people in Novosibirsk, in the universities in Akademgorodok. There was a development center in Nizhny Novgorod. There was a guy named Steve Chase who was instrumental in setting that up, and he often talked about the intellectual talent that was available there and how, if you have software problems that you require a mass of resources, you’d give it to Indians, and if you needed something that was completely impossible and needed creative solutions, you’d give it to Russians. Microsoft developed and recruited lots of people from Novosibirsk and Nizhny and some of the provinces. The tech companies had relationships there, in addition to Moscow and St. Petersburg. I think for consumer products, they spread out across the country and there were distributors for some kinds of industrial equipment—Caterpillar had regional distributors because the mining and forestry industries use their equipment and they were an important market for them.

I was thinking—since this is a large issue—the companies that you were consulting for and working with, did you notice any shift in their understanding of those opportunities moreso over time? Or was there openness thanks to your experience there that you were able to translate to them? Or did you experience reticence on their part to move into those regional markets?

That’s a good question. It’s a good question. I’m not sure I have a ready answer for that. I think that they remained reticent because Moscow is much more comfortable. It’s also comfortable for an expat to live there. There became a very large expat community. There were restaurants and there was this—what was it—there’s diners and bars—

Oh, the Starlight Diner.

Yes, the Starlight Diner. It was where all the Westerners went and it was comfortable. There was a Mexican restaurant on Tverskaya [Street] and Irish pubs, so Moscow was okay. You could live there. But for a foreigner to live in [2:15:00] Yaroslavl, it was much harder. From a personal point of view, I don’t think that it was hospitable to many. I think that is probably typical of a lot of the Russian provinces. If the company was interested in those regional markets, it really did it through Russian employees, primarily.

Also on the experiences of these companies that you’re consulting for—throughout the ‘90s there’s obviously all of this U.S. and transnational organization—World Bank and International Monetary Fund—economic reform going on, and shock therapy, and you know the impact that that had on the Russian economy. That impact that it had on the Russian economy is going to have a direct impact on your business’ ability to function. I’m curious if you noted the reaction of those businesses as these reforms were playing out and if there was any advisory or advocacy role that any of them, or you, undertook as you’re watching these things play out on the ground. Because there’s the implementation of reforms on one hand and then there’s what you’re experiencing very much in real time with your clients on the ground.

Right. Another good question and I’m not sure I have a complete answer. I think that one of the things is that Russians described this as a terrible time, the ‘90s was a terrible time. Whereas foreigners saw it as a time of openness, freedom, and opportunity. I can remember people in Yaroslavl saying to me, “If Stalin was around, this stuff wouldn’t happen, all this thievery of public property.” There was almost a nostalgia for the security of Soviet times amongst the population. While Russian industry was reeling at this time—I can think back at the industries in Yaroslavl, many of them had been integrated in their supply chains and in their markets with partners which are now in a separate country. The truck motor factory in Yaroslavl, which is a huge employer, was selling motors to a truck company in Belarus, so they had to cross a foreign border. They couldn’t do that anymore. The electric motor company couldn’t find its suppliers. These ended up laying off lots of people. Some of those are completely closed enterprises.

For them, this whole period of shock therapy reform was just one disaster after another. Trying to find consulting opportunities for them, with them, was really difficult. Increasingly, the companies that were able to take advantage of the situation had their headquarters in Moscow and were able to do it because they were on the ground there. They didn’t need any advice from people like me. It was all whether there were new companies willing to look at the market. There were some, and I did have some consulting assignments for some. And there was some market research about it because nobody knew that market.

I can remember one where—HP [Hewlett-Packard] has printers that print out the expiration date on foods and pharmaceuticals. They wanted to know whether Russians would buy these printers. We did a research project into how are they printing the labels [2:20:00] now? How do they buy the printers? And would they buy HP’s, knowing that HP is more expensive? We had to dig deep into the industry to understand how that industry worked, because even though HP had a presence there, they didn’t know how it worked. Ultimately, we were able to do the research using Russian employees to call the right people and identify who those right people were to give them an answer as to how they could market it and what the channels were.

There was some of that, but I would say, I don’t know. I didn’t see anything positive from the shock therapy, honestly. I’m just not sure of that. I think that really would require a lot more investigation. I think that what happened is the Russians began to say—stop telling us how to live, and also getting a hold of the banditry of the earlier period and getting that under control. Whereas the gangsters used to provide krysha, the government provided krysha, and pushed the gangsters out. It became once again a government function to provide order. Even if sometimes it required a little extra on the side, it was different than the bandits controlling it.

The Russian market economy, which was different than we conceived that it would be, has taken shape. They’ve rejected a lot of the things that were projected. I think there’s a sense of betrayal amongst some Americans that they could have been like us and they weren’t. I don’t know. Sometimes I think of it as like how sometimes organ transplants are rejected by a body, and this was kind of an organ transplant that was rejected by the body of Russia. Partly because I don’t think Westerners understood that very simple statement, that Moscow is not Russia. The fact that you can have some Russian intellectuals and bureaucrats in Moscow or St. Petersburg agree with you and undertake this massive transformation, there was a reaction from the other Russia against it. Ultimately, that other Russia, the weight of its history and culture, said, we’ll take some of what you recommend and we’re going to adopt some of it, and the rest of it, nope, no thank you. Again, I hope that’s not too abstract.

Not at all. Do you have any final thoughts that you’d like to add on anything about your experience that you think people should know?

I’m over and over taken by the lack of understanding of Russian people and Russian culture and the inability to differentiate between the Russian government and Russian people. And the extent to which people are willing to accept stereotypes about Russia that they would never accept about any other group of people. It’s just the most gross misunderstanding of a culture that’s much more sophisticated than they’re given credit for. We just continue to deal with Russia in a simplistic and stereotypical fashion, and it’s almost impossible to overcome.

I just see talking heads on TV, maybe they’ve been to Moscow once or twice, maybe not, maybe even three or four times, but they don’t know Russia. But they’re the experts. And the people that I know who worked in Russia, who had [2:25:00] Russian friends, who experienced Russia, whether they had bad experiences mixed with the good or whatever, those voices aren’t utilized or heard. And it’s just a tragedy. It’s really a tragedy. That’s my final thought.

Do you think that there’s anything that could be done to elevate those voices?

That’s a good question. I think that if we think back on how some of this connection started through citizen diplomacy, I think probably that’s the only place where that really survives where you actually have opportunities to meet real people and talk. Right now, Russia is caught up in the middle of battles between different conflicting groups in our own society. And I don’t think anybody has any real interest right now in doing anything more than using it as a cipher for fighting against your enemies. I’m not really optimistic at this moment that we’re going to see much progress, given our own domestic politics, which, again, is dangerous and shortsighted.

Well, we’ll leave it at that.

We’ll leave it at that.

[END OF INTERVIEW]