Anya Kucharev: I will send it to you. You read Russian, so... It’s not great, but it will—you know what happens, I’ll give you a fact here why I just…I’ve been on Mary Keen about this the last few years now she’s more free, we need a website commemorating Joseph. He’s not even in Wikipedia.
It is…I mean, my heart breaks when I think that he gave his life up, really, to making peace, he really did. When he went to Chechnya, and he never took care of himself, so his health—of course he had a heart attack. I thought he would have had it earlier the way—see, I lost touch with him in the ‘90s because I branched off and went to Eastern Europe to do “Frommer’s Guide to Eastern Europe” because I had been in Czechoslovakia when I was in Europe. I was curious to see all those countries. So, in the ‘90s I don’t know a lot about him. But
Joel [Schatz] has that material.
Anya Kucharev: Well, Joel [Schatz] wasn’t part of the original few early Space Bridges. He was good at the teleconferences from Henry Dakin’s gallery, but he was not involved at all—
Daniel Satinsky: In the Space Bridges. So, I have talked to
Evelyn Messinger, and
Kim Spencer, and Jim Hickman,
Peter Gerwe —
Anya Kucharev: Oh, good, you got Peter.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I found Peter. He was in Spain. Anyway, so I’ve constructed a version of that with the—and Evelyn has corrected it, Kim has corrected it. There’s a section in there about Joel, and he’s corrected his section. But still, I feel like there’s some pieces missing.
Anya Kucharev: Okay. You just triggered a memory. I think Harriett Crosby, her outfit ISAR, Institute for Soviet American Relations—
Daniel Satinsky: I’ve heard about her. And I understand that she won’t talk to people about this.
Anya Kucharev: No, no, she won’t. But that’s because she… For her…oh, anyway. I do have something that she published that has a chronology. I will look for it, yes.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, that would be great.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. That will help you, because she funded a lot of things. And why else? When she left Washington, D.C., she left politics. She’s now involved in the natural world. She has, I think, an animal sanctuary. I lost touch with her. We were never… You know, part of this also has to do with class.
I found I didn’t have trouble in the academic world, but funding meetings, and you had to…you either had to be a brand, or a famous academic, or…there was a lot of in, kind of groupthink, and you had to break through that. And Harriett came from Pillsbury money, big money. But if you said something she didn’t like you just didn’t exist. There was a lot of citizen diplomacy necessary in the group.
Daniel Satinsky: [
Laughs.] Yeah, yeah.
Anya Kucharev: And some of those prejudices still carry on. And I know this for a fact. She was one of the women heiresses that fell in love with Jim. Whatever falling in love meant. He was charismatic. But she played a large role. And she knew Ambassador Hartman. And she got Jim into Washington that way.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, I see.
Anya Kucharev: So, a lot of personal relationships here are important.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Anya Kucharev: And some people say oh, Anya, don’t gossip. But if you look at history and how it’s made, it’s made by individuals who connect, whether they fight or they fall in love, or I want your real estate, you know, it’s still going on. So… Wendy Grace, Gwendolyn Grace.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. Never heard of her.
Anya Kucharev: From the Grace Company.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, the Grace Company.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. And her sister heiress, both funded different things. Wendy had been married to the grandson of Rodzianko, who was killed in the Duma, so she was interested in Russian history because of her relationship, which ended, but nonetheless there was this whole Russian thing that she got involved in. And she gave Jim a lot of money. They helped bring into being a lot of things that might not have come into being because it was just not the business, it was strong, emotional, synchronous, enthusiastic—it’s very interesting how these things happen.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah.
Anya Kucharev: I will definitely send you Harriett’s…
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. That will be great.
Anya Kucharev: Yeah, she was a Washington activist. She knew Hartman, and that helped because her secretary was extraordinary, she was so helpful. Have you seen the ISAR bulletin that they put out? They were very important. In some ways, because they did—
Daniel Satinsky: Let me interrupt you about this because here’s the problem I have, is this is such a rich period, and there’s so much to be told about it, and it’s one chapter of a six-chapter book.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. I did look at the table of contents.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, I have to try to find what’s—two things—what’s most important and who will talk to me, because the value of my book is in the testimony or remembrance of people, because I think Birgit is writing a history, and it’s focused only on this period, and that’s a different thing. And you can do that on secondary sources. And so people like—I can mention someone like her or someone like Sharon Tennison is too important to leave out. Sharon Tennison won’t talk to me. Through a friend she sent me a message, “read my book,” which, I bought a copy of her book. So, I will reference her, but the meat is people’s remembrance.
So, when you have a chance to look at this chapter, you’ll see that it’s what Evelyn remembers, what Kim remembers, what Jim remembers. These are what I have to contribute by pulling these things together. So, for people who are important, I need to know that, and particularly I don’t want anyone from that period to say well, what an idiot, he doesn’t ever mention so-and-so.
But that’s not going to be what I have to base the book on. And I have the same thing—so I’ve written a draft of this period until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Now I have a second chapter. And listen, it’s been difficult to find the inner logic, if you will, of the period, not just funny stories, but what’s the inner logic, what was it coming from, what did it lead to. And then, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union I’m trying to do the same thing at that period. And there’s some overlap. Some of the people, like Jim, become not a citizen diplomat, but an entrepreneur.
Anya Kucharev: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: And Joel, who starts with citizen diplomacy and becomes an entrepreneur, or maybe he always was, I don’t know. But those are the…that’s what I’m trying to piece together. And then, as Jim said to me, we have a whole other side of this story, which was what was going on in the minds of the Russians. And we have very little understanding of that, because this isn’t a one-sided story, this was a collaborative effort.
Anya Kucharev: That’s why Joseph is so important.
Daniel Satinsky: Exactly. Exactly. And so, when did you first meet Joseph, or how did you meet him?
Anya Kucharev: There was an illegal apartment that Joseph partially lived in and had meetings in. He called it headquarters. On Yuzhinsky Pereulok
*. It was near the Arbat.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, it sounds familiar.
Anya Kucharev: Someone may have mentioned it. Anyway, I was brought there… Who brought me there? Now I can’t remember. But I will. I think it was with the AHP [Association of Humanistic Psychology] group. No, it had to be earlier. I can’t tell you that yet, but I will write it down and then write it, so it’ll be in text you’ll have it.
Daniel Satinsky: Great. And what was your first impression of him when you met him?
Anya Kucharev: I looked at him and I thought brilliant, and I thought in another lifetime you could be Napoleon. His ability to strategize and see the big picture was very impressive. He was eloquent in Russian, and his English was interesting. It was occasionally incorrect, but in a most wonderful way, like someone with a French accent will say things and it charms people.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, so charming.
Anya Kucharev: So, charm, but he also was inclusive. When I think of Joseph, when I looked at him there was Napoleon and then there was a globe. In those days I meditated a lot, and so my first impression of people was pictorial. I would get an image. In fact, when I introduced Joel to Joseph we were at lunch or dinner in one of the hotels and I looked at them talking and it was like Napoleon talking to Moses. [
Laughs.]
I just thought, oh, this is a match here energetically. Joel can be very—[
laughs]—he’s congenial and all that, but… Whereas Joseph is like a ball of fire, you know, he’s all over the place. And there was the globe. So, Joseph was trying to pull people together for an event. And these are the details—because I have not as many trips as Jim, but unlike Jim, he didn’t have to speak for two sides, so when we interpreted, it’s very hard to tell people that you can’t talk for two hours straight going back and forth on a serious topic. You can make dinner conversation and casual things, but to really focus and get it right—
Daniel Satinsky: It’s exhausting.
Anya Kucharev: —you have to trade off with someone else. That’s what they do at the UN. But I didn’t study professionally, but I understood immediately this really pulls on your brain. And my sugar would go down within half an hour, especially with the AHP. We’d go to these, you know, the hospital where they put dissidents and called them crazy. So, here I am going whoa, like I’m losing my mind here. So, I learned to bring packets of sugar with me for my brain. I had to, I—there I was.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And the people on each side also don’t understand the stress you’re under, honestly, right?
Anya Kucharev: They don’t. They don’t. Because they can translate two or three sentences and say oh, well, I speak the other language. I said, oh yeah?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Not even close.
Anya Kucharev: Yeah. Well, in my childhood, when I was telling you it was bleak, so I had a good imagination, and the Russian school I went to, one of my teachers was very skilled at keeping people’s attention. She could have been a great actress. She made poems come alive. I was very lucky. I had dreams that I was being visited by Pushkin. And I was able to translate some of his poems later on. I didn’t know I was going to do that. So, she carried that spirit. And that’s like some gurus or some teachers embody the spirit so much that they convey that information. That’s why Zoom is great, but it’s not the, you know—
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, no, it’s not the same.
Anya Kucharev: —you don’t have the aroma. It’s not the same thing. Come on. I hope the pandemic is showing that to humanity. So, yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: So, back to Joseph. One of the questions I have is that everyone talks about what great connections Joseph had, and yet the descriptions of him that I’ve seen is of a somewhat unkempt person, wasn’t quite clear how he made a living, holding meetings in an abandoned apartment, and then introducing people to cosmonauts and people with the, you know, at the Academy of Sciences. I’m trying to get my head around how that happened.
Anya Kucharev: I will give you those details how. He had Velikhov, who was high up in the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Daniel Satinsky: Right, but how does Velikhov have a connection to a guy who’s marginal to Soviet society?
Anya Kucharev: Well, there was a commission to study man, a complex study of man, so he knew enough people. He was a scientific secretary. I think his training was in microbiology or chemistry. He had a scientific background. [
Commission for the Complex Study of Man at the Scientific Council on Cybernetics of the Academy of Sciences, headed by Academician Aksel’ Berg.]
He also studied—and this is how he learned English—there was a Bulgarian, Lozanov, who had a language learning method called Suggestology. And Joseph studied this way. I think Lozanov came and gave lectures, but I can check on that. And that’s the kind of thing I can’t find in the letters and all the stuff that Joel has, but I do have a friend who emigrated to Germany, and she—I tried to get Birgit to interview her, but I don’t know why, the chemistry didn’t work, and Tanya was sick. But I will—now I have a list of questions from you that I can get clarified. But I know that because he knew Jushkevichius, who was at Gosteleradio
* as an engineer, but he became more than that, they were all interested in human potential. So, he was the Scientific Secretary of the Complex Study of Man.
Daniel Satinsky: And this was done by the Russian Academy of Sciences?
Anya Kucharev: Yes. That was a group that was looking at the fact that they were in stagnation when they had so many brilliant people, like what’s going on here? We know it’s Brezhnev and all of that, but how do we bust out of that without winding up in jail? So, Velikhov was very far thinking. Who else? He also knew—oh, this is where the space thing comes in. He knew another academician, Boris Rauschenbach, who wrote a very interesting study, which, if someone would pay me, I would translate it. So, he had people who were—excuse me.
Rauschenbach. Kitaev-Smyk, who died, he was very intercultural. He understood so much. I’ll get his name to you. These are all people who were kind of the avant-garde in terms of exploring human potential. [
Russian] Skrytnye Chelovecheskiye Vozmozhnosti is human potential.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay.
Anya Kucharev: I mean, literally it means the study of latent or hidden reserves. That’s how they translated human potential. So, Joseph studied English with Lozanov, or someone who trained in his method. And part of that method, when you are too engaged in your executive function, you’re not absorbing things the way a child does, so Lozanov—and I know he got this from somewhere, but I haven’t traced it yet. He said put on music. The best music to play—I can hear his voice—adagio, second movement of Baroque concerti. So, everybody lies down on pillows, Esalen style, and absorbs reams of vocabulary words. They’re not related, even. But they remember them because it’s been absorbed in that way of, like I said, the way a child hears it, and then a year later he’s making full sentences.
So, this method, they were studying that. These were all these guys doing experiments.
Daniel Satinsky: But Joseph was part of these experiments, or he just knew these people?
Anya Kucharev: He knew about them because they were included in this complex approach, this comprehensive study. And he…oh… He was alone. He had had a wife who died of a kidney problem, and he was so depressed. He needed something to do. And this studying English, he studied it because she was from America.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh.
Anya Kucharev: Yes. She was half Russian, half American. I think her name was Joy. I never could pin that down. He never wanted to talk about that. But I can ask Tanya because she met her. So, Joseph knew people through film, because he wrote screenplays. And he knew Pozner, and Pozner’s father was in the movie world.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. So, he was a microbiologist, and he wrote screenplays. Amazing, yeah.
Anya Kucharev: He also had been in the merchant marine, so he had traveled, so he had an idea of the globe, not just from geography books. And he had interests. He was—so the Soviet American thing for him also was personal because he wasn’t allowed to emigrate so that she could have a kidney operation. They told them you can’t even leave, because we are working on a kidney transplant. But she died before. And yeah, it was a tragedy.
But you see, he also had this vision. He understood theater really well. That’s why there were the demonstrations in Red Square. He knew how to stage events. That’s where the big screen, the Diamond Vision. Because some Europeans had come, he had met them. And then he applied for the Rolex award. So, he was…his feelers were out. And then Jushkevichius was affiliated with UNESCO, and that’s pretty out there. If you can, get a Zoom with him about Joseph because—
Daniel Satinsky: How would I find him?
Anya Kucharev: I can give you, his email. It might have changed, but at least it’s a start. And we can find him. I can call someone up and say where is Henrykh? I interviewed him for…what was I writing? Oh, yes. I was showing the kinds of people that could contribute to these archives. So, for me it would be a recapitulation, and I would get questions answered that way. And I met with Jushkevichius. He said oh, I’m just here from Paris for a week but I’m happy to meet you—you know Joseph, you know all this history, you’ve interpreted for them, of course.
And I didn’t know who he was except by name, but when I met him, I was very impressed with him as an entity, as a—the energy he carried. Also, he was Lithuanian or—but he was multicultural. The whole thing of understanding the way different cultures interact. Like he would say well, you know, I could have pushed this thing through, but I knew I shouldn’t push because then they’ll be looking and saying oh, he wants that, we’re not going to give that. And that’s how we did the first Space Bridge, because he okayed it at Gosteleradio. Everybody else was on vacation.
So, Joseph had a very good phrase. He said you have to pierce through the armor of the bureaucracy. Pierce through it.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, that’s an excellent phrase.
Anya Kucharev: He said but you can’t do it when they’re watching, you have to—
phew!—you know.
And the other phrase he used that everybody loved—this one he used more—he said you can have an effect on a person. You can flatten them. You can flatten them. In other words, energetically. You don’t have to argue. Just flatten them. And I immediately understood that he was looking at the kind of invisible, you know, this New Age thing about energy. Yes, there’s a way that people… Some people don’t use a gun. They don’t have to. They just, you know, they can intimidate you to the point where you are flattened, you can’t respond. It’s the CEO who makes 50 times more than the rest of his workers who comes in, oh, I’m entitled, to hell with you. I mean, Zuckerberg is like a robot. The first few times I watched him I thought oh my god.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Anya Kucharev: So, Joseph really had backing. And here’s where Harriett comes in also. The second time he was put in a psychiatric hospital—not because he was crazy, although there are, you know—it’s because he was raising the level too high for breakthrough—
Daniel Satinsky: Pushing beyond the boundaries?
Anya Kucharev: Pushing beyond. Because he would get desperate. And part of it is, like I said, he didn’t take care of his health. He would get into these manic states, and he just couldn’t come down, because he wasn’t eating. He wasn’t eating.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you don’t think he might have had the manic depressive…?
Anya Kucharev: I think he had some, but it’s exacerbated when you live in conditions that don’t nurture you. He had a very close friend, Vitold, who died. Vitold was overweight, not obese, but really solid. He actually took care of Joseph. He fed him. He would make him come over and eat real food, not just little cups of yogurt, those little blue jars of yogurt that Joseph had at headquarters in the corner. I said Joseph, what is that? He says oh, it’s my food. I said, you have 50 bottles of yogurt here! He said, yeah, I like yogurt. [
Laughs.] So, Vitold was important also because he had been abroad. He got himself a funny job at MGU
* downtown. Near the National Hotel.
He also liked this idea of human potential because he began to see where Joseph was coming from and why it was necessary, the interdisciplinary thing Joseph was trying to do. And he was an engineer, so he could help with things that broke down, you know, soldering lamps, so he was a technical assistant, but he also grounded Joseph. He gave him a kind of home because Vitold was a good cook, he had a—I won’t say lovely—but comfortable home. And once Vitold died, that was sad.