Daniel Satinsky: My intent is to preserve a summary record of a period of time in which there was an intense interaction between Americans and Russians, historically unique and, as far as we can tell, not likely to be repeated on this scale in the near future. That engagement really began with citizen diplomacy and people-to-people exchanges. Later, as the Soviet Union began to open up and then dissolved, one of the characteristics of Russians is that they like to do things with people they know. They do not trust strangers. They don't put ads in the newspaper and put out tenders and expect really to do things. So a number of people like Jim, who were involved in citizen diplomacy, were kind of called upon by the Russians to say, can you help us as we make this transition and become integrated into the world? And so that's how the two periods merge in my view, in my observation of it. And I guess the other side of that is that given how bad relations are now, it seems worth thinking back about that period of citizen diplomacy and what can be learned from it in terms of relations going forward. But that's somewhat outside the book. But I'm not sure yet. It might be part of the book. So, you know, clearly the citizen diplomacy is more about politics in a way. For me, in terms of the book, politics or the context in which people interact. The framework of politics only tells us what's possible for people on their own initiative, what kinds of things they can be involved in. So, and that's how I put the two together. And I didn't think that I could accurately describe the impact of Americans on Russia in the 90s without starting with citizen diplomacy. I just didn't think it would be possible.

Daniel Satinsky: And I don't know, when I looked at the Wikipedia entry for you, it said that you were the creator of this Space bridge, co-creator.

Evelyn Messinger: Does it say creator or co-creator?

Daniel Satinsky: I believe it says creator. Let me just take a quick look.

Evelyn Messinger: Well, yeah, that's conceptually true. Maybe I have to see if I can change that because Joseph Goldin ^{1 2 3 4 5} and I had the same idea essentially at the same time.

Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay. It says you were the American creator.

Evelyn Messinger: That is accurate.

Daniel Satinsky: Okay.

Evelyn Messinger: Creator in terms of conceptualizing. Joseph did. There were differences, but essentially it was the same idea. Strangely, I didn't know him at the time.

Daniel Satinsky: So how did you come to this idea? What was your role within the set of people here?

Evelyn Messinger: There are other names we can talk about later. So, what happened was simple. You want me to just start telling you?

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, just tell me. Tell me your story.


Evelyn Messinger: At first, I met Kim [Spencer]. I was a young, new TV producer. I worked on a documentary that won some awards, and I was a news editor at the time for CBS News at the local San Francisco Bureau. Kim and I met because I made a documentary about wind energy, and he was involved with energy at the time too.

Daniel Satinsky: Wow. That was prescient. That was way before.

Evelyn Messinger: So that's why we started to talk. He was this brilliant guy who understood satellites and PBS thought he was wonderful because he was using their satellites to do these TV shows. And, so he was producing a program of connecting Americans around the country on Thanksgiving Day. So, it's like if you didn't watch football, it was something else you could watch, which was Americans celebrating Thanksgiving across the country live, connected to each other. But it was all through the central location. And he hired me to produce the San Francisco link to all of that. Art Buchwald. You know who he is?

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.

Evelyn Messinger: Okay, so he was the host in the studio in Washington, and he could see these monitors. The idea was that he would say, okay, thank you for asking that question, Boston, San Francisco, what do you think? Like that. My group was a group of young people who had been taken away from their families due to child abuse or whatever and were in a group home in San Francisco. There was a motorcycle gang in Boston, a military family. A nice, wonderful idea. Anyway, once it got going, what happened was everybody at their Thanksgiving table had a little TV set, so they could see what the other people were saying.

What started to happen is that they would just answer each other and completely ignore poor Art Buchwald sitting in the studio by himself. Nobody was even listening to him. And it was really interesting because that wasn't expected. Next thing, Kim and I fell in love. And the next thing you know, we were together. He got a grant from PBS for a show about Russia and nuclear war.

Daniel Satinsky: Okay.

Evelyn Messinger: So I worked on that. He produced it, I directed it and wrote it. It was a pretty good documentary about how Americans, many different Americans, dealt with nuclear war. There was a family, a guy who worked at Livermore Labs on the neutron bomb, an old lady peace activist, one of the anti-bomb people from the 60s. So, again, it was this diverse group of people. And every day, a friend of ours named John Stier would call up and say, but wait a minute, what about the Russians? What about the Russians? What about the Russians? Everyone was like, we can't do the Russians, we don't have the money, we can't go to Russia. Nobody could go to Russia anyway. But it got me thinking. Somehow the two things came together in my head, which was connecting people and having them suddenly talk to each other. And not needing a mediator, a moderator between. And what about the Russians? And I thought, wait a minute. What if the Americans could talk to the Russians. He knows how to do satellites. Maybe we should do that. So, we started talking about it. We wrote this big proposal called the Second Kitchen Debate for TV. It was really great. It should happen now. There are Russian families at breakfast and American families at dinner and they have a meal together and talk about their lives. This continued into the future. But anyway, we made this big proposal and everything. Sent it in and they turned it down immediately and said, this is ping pong propaganda.

Daniel Satinsky: So this was a reference to ping pong diplomacy?

Evelyn Messinger: I think that must have been.

Daniel Satinsky: That must have been. Because that's what opened China. The Detroit auto workers went and played ping pong in China and that opened up China.

Evelyn Messinger: But why they came up with that, I don't know. But anyway. We were very involved, deeply engaged in the issue of nuclear war.

Daniel Satinsky: Okay, so it wasn't just a job thing. It was a personal commitment.

Evelyn Messinger: One reason we got together was we were both kind of activist TV people. It was very interesting. We actually did some really interesting stuff around nuclear war. That documentary was quite good. Meanwhile, I don't quite know how it happened, but Kim heard about this guy, Jim Hickman. He was interested or was going to Russia or had gone and was going to go back. He worked at Esalen. We decided to go. I'd never been there, nor had he. So, we drive all the way down there and we end up, I'm not kidding, sitting in a hot bath with Jim Hickman, telling him this whole story. PBS turned us down and he's like, oh, that's really interesting. We had a nice talk. A few months later, he calls out of the blue and says, we're doing it. He had gone to Steve Wozniak. I don't remember anything about all of that. Anyway, the next thing you know, he calls, and I didn't go, but Kim just got in the car and drove down there.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I know from the podcast and also from what Jim wrote about it, but it's still actually a bit fuzzy as to how successful it was. So, we'll get to that.

Evelyn Messinger: If you want me to, I can just keep going.

Daniel Satinsky: Please keep going.

Evelyn Messinger: You should know one thing. Go to youtube.com/spacebridges. Kim put up a whole bunch of the space bridges. They're literally unedited. There are little montages. We used them for promos and other things. But then there are the whole space bridges, and the second one is really the crucial one.

Daniel Satinsky: Okay. The second one.

Evelyn Messinger: Well, the first one doesn't exist online. The second one is called "Linking Us Together." Steve Wozniak was doing this US festival and I talked him into connecting. The story of this is hilarious. We had a bunch of young people in the studio going, "Yay! Let's rock and roll!" Meanwhile, Bill Graham. Do you know who that is?

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, sure.

Evelyn Messinger: So Bill Graham was hot. He was doing the whole music venue at the US festival, which included big name bands and all this. It was a big deal, huge audience. Above the stage was this giant screen. Usually showing a close-up of the lead singer or whatever. But the idea was to put the Russians up on the screen in between the acts.

That's what they wanted to do. Bill Graham, who was Hungarian, decided that it's a fake. There is no way the Russians are letting a video feed come from Russia into the US. There's no way they would really do it. And it's a fake and I will not put it up there on screen.

Daniel Satinsky: Whoa!

Evelyn Messinger: At first, there were ladies with handkerchiefs singing Russian folk songs. I think that got up there before he figured it out. I mean, it wasn't probable. Who would believe this actually happened? We always knew our side, but we never understood what happened on their side.

Daniel Satinsky: So from their point of view, it all went through, and everything was shown to an American audience. But that's not what happened.

Evelyn Messinger: But thank God, they pretended it was shown to an American audience. Which is pretty great. So now everybody's ready to do it again, right?

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.

Evelyn Messinger: We didn't know. Just as an aside, the dire straits that the Soviet economy was in, and that Gorbachev was one of these guys called the men of the ‘60s. Have you ever heard this phrase?

Daniel Satinsky: No.

Evelyn Messinger: There were these young men who were coming up into the Soviet leadership, and they understood that there was no gold in the bank. Zero. They were totally broke, and no one knew. This was a big secret, but they knew they had to open up. There was no choice. Andropov was one of them, too. And Joseph Goldin, somehow, knew them all. It was very weird. Very, very strange.

Daniel Satinsky: He seems like a very mysterious character.

Evelyn Messinger: Our Russian producers hated him. They wanted him out of the studio. He was impossible to deal with. He was so committed. He would walk up and say, my job is to save the world. And he would not stop. Quite a visionary, really, in that traditional kind of crazed Russian visionary way.

Daniel Satinsky: Yes. I'd read some of them.

Evelyn Messinger: You see why I'd like to make a movie out of this. I'd like to have Joel and Joseph in this movie. He was something. He still is. But he was really quite a character.

So anyway, let's think about what happened then. The second one, though by now we all have started. We said, okay, we're going to make this right now.

Daniel Satinsky: Right. I took part in a Space Bridge at that time and shortly after, and I remember you were constantly talking over each other because of the lag time.

Evelyn Messinger: It was very tricky. That part was hard. There was a guy named Peter Gerwe.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I need to talk to Peter. I met him maybe once or twice in Moscow in the 90s. So, I need an introduction to him.

Evelyn Messinger: He produced the second Space Bridge. I think they hired Peter to produce it. I didn't meet him until later, but I believe he did.

Daniel Satinsky: Was Peter in Moscow?

Evelyn Messinger: No, he was in the US. He was in California.

Daniel Satinsky: California.

Evelyn Messinger: Jim and the other guy whose name I forgot went back to Russia.

Daniel Satinsky: Not Garrison?

Evelyn Messinger: No, I'll think of his name. I think he funded it. He was like a rich kid kind of person. I can't quite remember his name. I'll think of it. I haven't seen much of him since then. They went to Russia again. You'll see him in the video. They built a tent on the grounds of the US festival. I didn't have anything to do with who was in. But the moderator was Sam Keane, the famous writer of a book called Faces of the Enemy. Which was about how Russians in America, how people demonize each other. Rusty was in it. Astronaut and cosmonaut.

Two scientists, or I think they were called bureaucrats being George Brown who was a congressman and Velikhov was the bureaucrat. And then a teacher and a teacher. One on each side. Bureaucrat and a bureaucrat. An astronaut and a cosmonaut. And a host on each side. One was Sam Keene, and the other was this guy, Vladimir [Posner]. Showed up and spoke perfect English. We were like, well, wow.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, you didn't expect that.

Evelyn Messinger: No. And in fact, I think they took him off it for a while, and then he went back on later.

Daniel Satinsky: And there was no music as part of this.

Evelyn Messinger: Oh yeah. There was music. That was completely different. Instead of using the big screen, the big stages. This tent, this was where it happened. In the beginning, I think in the morning, there was the link to talk, the two sides talking. And in the evening, there were two jazz quartets, one in the US and one in Russia, they played together. The musician was an American singer-songwriter. I can't remember his name. And the Russians had a group called the Aquarium, I think.

Daniel Satinsky: Oh, Aquarium. Yeah. They were a very famous, early rock and roll group. I once had a record of theirs. I don't know what happened to it. They copied the Beatles.

Evelyn Messinger: They probably wouldn't have let them play that anyway. They played jazz. I'm not sure it was them. I think it was. That's a different story about the Beatles, but we'll leave that for another time. So, we were working in this trailer. It was like 100 degrees. Just working, working. I went to participate when the thing actually happened. I went and sat in the audience. It changed my life.

Daniel Satinsky: Really?

Evelyn Messinger: It was the height of the “evil empire.” Nobody had talked to each other for how many years. And suddenly, there they are. And there we are. I met the cosmonaut, the astronaut. Brilliant, because it takes you up into the bigger picture with video of space. Rusty was quite a character. His memoir is very interesting. Bright colors and all. They knew each other already, the cosmonaut and the astronaut. The thing that blew everybody away was Velikhov, who was supposed to be a bureaucrat. He sat there and said something like, "We want to be sure that there will never be a nuclear war." Americans didn't know that the Russians didn't want this. Everyone in the place was in shock. People started crying. Literally crying and reaching out. It was tremendously moving, realizing that we felt the same way. We were all a bunch of activists anyway. It was really, really amazing. And so, I think that really changed everything in a way. That was the start of the whole thing. It was a big success. At night, the groups played together, and people danced. It was all in this tent, not in the big venue. But it really worked this time.

Daniel Satinsky: How many people were in that tent?

Evelyn Messinger: There were 50-75, maybe.

Daniel Satinsky: So these were mostly peace activists.

Evelyn Messinger: Also citizen diplomats and tech people. The whole thing was about tech.

Daniel Satinsky: Right.

Evelyn Messinger: You'll see the whole thing. We made this documentary, which I believe is up there, an hour-long documentary. I'm not sure if it's the whole Space Bridge or just the documentary, but I edited the doc. We made this big documentary. Oh, I apologize, the ping pong diplomacy was not when they turned down the proposal. It was when we sent the first Space Bridge. They turned that down and called that ping pong diplomacy.

Daniel Satinsky: Really?

Evelyn Messinger: Can you imagine? But we finally got it on the air. It's a little muddy how it finally got on the air. But once it did, the TV reviewer guy from the New York Times at the time was a conservative. It was the Reagan era, right?

Daniel Satinsky: Right.

Evelyn Messinger: And he lambasted this thing. Like, how dare you allow Russians to speak to Americans? They're just parroting the propaganda of their own country. It might have been a later one, actually, that this happened, but not long after. And he called it execrable. I've always been very proud that we worked on this execrable TV program. Isn't that weird? It's all strange.

Daniel Satinsky: Well, yes and no. There's certainly a continuity between the past and the present.

Evelyn Messinger: The next thing you know, UC San Diego wanted to do a thing about the anniversary of the war. I didn't work on that, but Kim did. Kim became the go-to producer of Space bridges. If anybody was going to do any, they'd come to him. He was the one that did them right.

Daniel Satinsky: And were they broader than just Russia?

Evelyn Messinger: Soviet-American dialogue. There was one from San Diego with veterans of both wars. It was the 45th anniversary, I think.

Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay.

Evelyn Messinger: The end of World War II. And then they did another one. The San Diego people did another one of kids reading books to each other.

Daniel Satinsky: That was in the podcast. And there was one from Minneapolis called Peace Child.

Evelyn Messinger: Yeah. I've told people this before, and I'll tell it to you. Some famous quotation goes, "Every great idea starts as heresy and ends as orthodoxy." And you can look at that.

Daniel Satinsky: That's good.

Evelyn Messinger: It's a good one. And that's exactly what happened. Starting at the execrable. Right. Which was most fun. The best one was Peace Child. I produced it in Minneapolis, and Kim was in Moscow.

It was a British guy and enthusiastic peace activist who had gone to Russia with a group of kids, actors, singers, or something, teenagers, and had these two groups meet in Moscow and they did a play together that he wrote called Peace Child. It was really corny. But then he came back and managed to raise the money to do it as a TV thing. The TV people agreed to air it. It was live… I can't remember. John Denver showed up. I don't know how he got there. It could have been Jim who brought him.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. I think Jim talked about taking John Denver to Russia. I don't know if that was before or after this.

Evelyn Messinger: I don't know either. There's a short version of that up on the Space Bridge site. It was like, "It's about time we talk about peace," something like that. Moving. That one was a play. It was really fun.

Daniel Satinsky: Why Minneapolis?

Evelyn Messinger: I think that's where the kids were from that he brought over, the British guy. I see his face in front of me. Names disappear after so long. Anyway, he brought this group over from Minneapolis to Moscow to do this play.

Daniel Satinsky: So, that's the Minneapolis connection. And there is a Minneapolis Russian-American Business and Cultural Society that still exists.

Evelyn Messinger: It was a TV station. I can't remember which one. I think it was WCCO, maybe. They were ambitious. They did agree to do it. It was wonderful because we got to mess around with getting people to sing together with the time lag.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.

Evelyn Messinger: One interesting thing, we also did a scene from the play where they held hands. This was the big highlight, and it got news coverage across the whole U.S.

Daniel Satinsky: Wow.

Evelyn Messinger: So it was the first breakthrough. Who wouldn't cover that? Reaching out beyond the divide, two kids holding hands.

Daniel Satinsky: Through space and all this. So, you and Kim became like the team to do this Space bridge.

Evelyn Messinger: I think that was the one I worked on after, because I didn't work on the two in between. That might have been the fourth or fifth, depending on how you count. From then on, there was a whole sequence of doing this until I had twins. So, you know, that was pretty wild. The amazing thing was going back and forth to Russia, where we tried so hard to get these things on TV. It was really hard. In fact, it was probably the UC San Diego one that got called execrable, maybe because it would have been the first one that actually aired. It was a university, so PBS probably took it. From then on, they took them all. People wanted to do this or that. It was very interesting to come up with it. If you could do this in person, don't do it on TV. That was one of the things we learned.

Russians started doing this with Bulgaria. Anyway, the Russians were into it. Our two producers were great, but we had no idea. We never knew if they would do it or not. They almost always did. Now we know why. But at the time, we didn't know why they would do this, let alone whether they would do any given one. The most important one, most people would say, was Nuclear Winter. Carl Sagan and a few other eminent scientists had published this paper that a nuclear war would cause a nuclear winter. That was terrible. One thing led to another, and the next thing you know, we're going to do a space bridge with scientists on both sides. It was going to be on CNN. CNN, I believe, was the one who ran it.

Daniel Satinsky: Wow.

Evelyn Messinger: And so suddenly this was really important. There was a lot of tension. They wrote a lot about it. It was really important for the Russians to do this, and they wouldn't use our name, but we called it the world after nuclear war. They called it the world against nuclear war. I guess their bosses told them they had to do that. We had these very dark, gloomy sets on both sides. I was doing the American side, and Kim was on the other side. In the middle, there was a kind of break. Apparently, the Russians had to go off and decide whether they were going to say “yes.” They did. They said, “yes, it's important.” Carl Sagan was on it. You'll see that one too.

Daniel Satinsky: Did you ever go to Russia too?


Evelyn Messinger: Yes. I went there a lot, early on, and participated in the talks about these things and meetings with people. An experience I'll never forget was getting off the plane in Moscow with a suitcase full of video tapes. These tapes were pretty big. Kim must have already done that. He said, just say "telemost" when you get to customs. Or maybe it was Joel who said that. Anyway, I said it. I mean, can you imagine? I don't remember which trip that was, but I did produce one of them. Maybe I only really went and did one. I felt more comfortable back in the US. I think somebody was getting worried or I don't know what. This one was very complicated. It kept jumping up. This is Jim Garrison. I think this was his one. It was about some kind of scientific work. It wasn't climate change. It must have had something to do with nuclear power. I don't even remember the subject, to tell you the truth. I was on the Russian side, and it kept jumping time zones across Russia to different places. It was like the chief scientists of Krasnoyarsk and then in Siberia. I don't even know, except it was really hard to control. You get a scientist on there, and he's given like 20 minutes to talk. But there's no way he's going to stop talking. So, I'm going, we got to cut off, turning to their producer but he goes “no, you cannot stop a Russian scientist from speaking.” It was really a nightmare. I think the show came out okay, because it was edited. These never aired live in Russia. The Russian never aired it live. I don't know if they did it first. But we were on the front page of Pravda. I think somewhere Kim has all this news coverage. There was hardly any mention in the US press except the "execrable" comment and the Peace Child videos. But in Russia, it was front page news every time. Huge. I was on the bus with Pavel, and he goes, oh, they're talking about the space bridge. Just tremendous. In Russia, it was a sensation. Posner was back. I don't even think he worked on the one I was there for. He did most of it from then on. At a certain point, I had twins. That was 1987. Close to the end anyway. This all went on throughout the ‘80s. Then there was Donahue. I didn't work on those. I did a little bit on the side. That was a whole series, and it jumped it to another level. It kept going up, up.

Finally, my former partner, David Hoffman, who you might want to talk to, he knows a lot, not about this era, but the next phase of dealing with Russia. We were partners. He went and talked to George Brown, who had been a congressman, and introduced our company. Next thing you know, he's got all these congressmen excited about doing a Space bridge. He put together one between the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Soviet. This was on the far side of Phil Donahue. So, by now, it was a big deal. It had gone from being called execrable to being on Phil Donahue. David produced it. Sure enough, on ABC News, a huge special series ran, like 3 or 4 of these. Again, we went from heresy to orthodoxy. These were the most boring space bridges, they kept getting more boring. I mean, you had congressmen saying the same things. Oh, who was that anchor for ABC who died from cancer? Peter Jennings. He hosted them. And the big thing was, you're going to let Jews go. That was a big deal. They announced they were going to let Jews go. But really nothing interesting. Pontificating on both sides. The big thing was, the Donahue ones were the first ones that were live.

Daniel Satinsky: In the podcast, they talk about it being edited.

Evelyn Messinger: The Donahue ones. I think they were aired live in the US, but the Russians were still editing them. Then ABC News said, it's live on both sides or not at all. So suddenly this was live. The US Congress won two Emmys. Huge big deal.

Daniel Satinsky: Wow.

Evelyn Messinger: Because, you know, it was a big thing. That was the whole scope.

Daniel Satinsky: And who produced those? Was that taken over by ABC, or did your crew do that?

Evelyn Messinger: Our company was always involved, between either me, David, or Kim. But yes, ABC News produced it. They hired Kim to work on TV, doing live stuff. He's really good at it. So we moved to New York. That was wild. There was a whole other phase of dealing with Russia. David and I started an office in New York. It was a good thing the way it turned out. It's a great place to be. We kept up with thinking about Russia this whole time. Although he went off to grow pot in Mendocino County, I think at that point. And so I was doing whatever. Kim was working for ABC. Just briefly, the way it came about was that a friend of mine, a German living in New York, went back to Germany as the Berlin Wall was falling down, and he started a pirate radio station in Leipzig, East Germany. That was the heart of the Berlin Wall falling. He figured out that you could take those old VHS machines, you know, and make a transmitter. There's an RF output at the back, and you put a little antenna on it, and you could transmit the signal out to a city block. People could figure out they could pick up the signal. The video of the revolution coming from the main center of it.

Daniel Satinsky: Wow.

Evelyn Messinger: Wow. This is amazing. I called the Whole Earth Review, which was actually called the Coevolution Quarterly at the time.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I remember it.

Evelyn Messinger: I said, I want to go to Germany and write a story about this. They said, okay, we'll pay your expenses. Because that was the good old days. So I did. I went there and wrote this whole story about what had happened. I was fascinated with all this. Anyway, just to go quickly, I started to discover that this was happening all over Eastern Europe. Kim, as part of his ABC job, was going to Moscow with Diane Sawyer to interview Shevardnadze. This was early 1990, 1991.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, it had to be.

Evelyn Messinger: Yeah, 1990. I said, look, while you're there, see if you can find any independent TV stuff going on because I'm finding it all over here. He comes back and there's like 3000 tiny TV stations all over Russia.

Daniel Satinsky: Wow. Using the same technology?

Evelyn Messinger: Well, the technology turns out to be the easy part if you are so inclined. I got a grant from USAID to go all over Eastern Europe and find all these. We made a book, a how-to guide on building your own pirate radio and TV stations. We translated and distributed it all over. But they were doing it in Russia too. The minute a government falls apart, the regulations disappear, and somebody starts broadcasting. It's true today. I could be broadcasting in my neighborhood here. That's exactly what happened everywhere. People would do it with a little UHF transmitter. In Russia, they had those big apartment building complexes, giant buildings. All of them would be wired together with one big antenna on the roof picking up Channel One. Cause what else was there? These people would literally go up and disconnect the main antenna, then plug in a VHS machine and play tapes they made. And in the basements, there would be a little TV studio where they would do the news of the neighborhood or whatever it was. They'd go out and interview people, then go around and knock on doors to collect money. They also put porn on there too, which always made it popular. This was happening everywhere, all over the region, and all over the Soviet Union too. I couldn't deal with the Soviet Union until I got hired by George Soros to go around and give these people money all over Eastern Europe who were starting these little radio and TV stations. That was fun.

Daniel Satinsky: Wow.

Evelyn Messinger: For a job, because, you know, it's a slog, and then you end up in Romania where it's a mess. But it was very rewarding. And you end up helping them write the laws for free media in these countries, some of which have survived. The same thing was happening in Russia. So, David got all excited about this, and he and I wrote a big proposal about what was happening in Russia. Our friend and funder, Wade Green, bless his heart, decided he wanted to fund Russian TV. We met him and told him about the 3000 TV stations in Russia. He said, oh, good, we want to fund that. I was busy with Eastern Europe, so David took the lead on this.

Daniel Satinsky: Wasn't USAID money?

Evelyn Messinger: Not yet.

Daniel Satinsky: Okay.

Evelyn Messinger: They were calling us, saying it's so interesting what you're doing. We said, “go away.” It was the spirit of the times, right? So eventually, it was inevitable. David and I started to go to Russia. This was like phase two, sort of policy.

Daniel Satinsky: Right, so phase two, you're watching the emergence of free media after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Evelyn Messinger: Yes, I think I started in 1991. I started with Soros. I was doing this for a couple of years. Meanwhile, David was developing the project in Russia. I was going to Russia with him. It was too much to travel with twins, living in New York and traveling back and forth to Eastern Europe. It was crazy. So, Kim quit his job, and we moved to Paris in 1991. Then I could jump back and forth really easily. We had a close friend who did a whole TV show based on the Space Bridges, very personal Space Bridges between people. They used video conferencing equipment, which was new and as big as a refrigerator.

Daniel Satinsky: Right, I remember that.

Evelyn Messinger: It was a lot cheaper than doing satellites. They started doing these between different parts of the world. It was a nice series. Meanwhile, I'm traveling back and forth to Eastern Europe. We had twins and made it work somehow. Finally, back to Russia. Soros had someone else in Russia, so we were all working parallel. David popped up, and I introduced him to George, who got excited about David. At a certain point, Ukraine became essential. I was working with the foundation in Ukraine, and they wanted to make a media center. David talked George into doing it. David went to USAID, and they had $7 million they needed to use by the end of the year. The media center sounded like a great idea.

Daniel Satinsky: Wow.

Evelyn Messinger: Next thing you know, we had a huge amount of money, more than we'd ever seen. We had to decide where to leave Europe because our kids were school age. We decided to come back to California. David said, “good, because we have lots of money.” We were all getting regular paychecks for the first time. We were always a nonprofit. That became more difficult with the US government. Their accounting systems were different, and they had more money than any foundations. They kept asking why we were still a nonprofit and why we didn't become a contractor. We wouldn't, to our credit. Eventually, then there's Manana. David found this amazing woman in Moscow. He traded an Apple computer for her. She was working for the guy who started the Glasnost Foundation, Alexei Simonov. Do you know him?

Daniel Satinsky: No, but that name sounds vaguely familiar.

Evelyn Messinger: An old guy with a beard, always smoking stinky cigarettes. A human rights activist. Manana was working with him. So, David trades him a computer for Manana. She was unbelievable. The greatest thing we ever did was get Manana. We started an office in Moscow. The report we wrote helped raise some money, and next thing you know, we're finding all these TV stations. Manana starts a consortium of independent TV. There's a woman, a lawyer in Berkeley, who put together a conference of these independent Russian media. It was the first conference of independent Russian media.

Daniel Satinsky: What year was that?

Evelyn Messinger: Probably 91 or 92.

Daniel Satinsky: Probably 92. Nemtsov was the governor, and it was the hotbed of reform.

Evelyn Messinger: Yes, maybe that's why I was there. Liz put it together. I went with Wade Green.

Daniel Satinsky: What was her name again?

Evelyn Messinger: Liz Hasse. So, I went with Wade. A guy named Monroe Price was there. An interesting guy, an academic. He was at Yale. He did a lot of legal stuff with Russia later, based out of London. All these really interesting people and these young, like 20-year-old guys who had started their own TV and radio stations. It was very exciting. Wade said, we should train these journalists. I said, yeah, we should. Wade got the money, and we started training for journalists across Russia. It was great. Journalists came to teach them how to be journalists. Manana became the head of the commission that gave licenses to stations. She became very powerful. Meanwhile, Putin came in during this period.

Daniel Satinsky: So you're talking about the whole period of the 90s, because Putin didn't come in until 2000.

Evelyn Messinger: Right. Around 2000 was maybe the peak of this work in Russia. It was going fine in Eastern Europe, and in Russia, it was even better. Producers in Russia were doing a whole series of programs that we could broadcast across this network of independent media. In Kiev, they built a big satellite dish on their media center. There were always problems, but that's a different story. It got to this huge peak. Manana was super powerful. She would fly back and forth to Europe because Internews had an office there. We had meetings in Europe. Manana would come and bring money back in. We used to have a line item called bribes, but we had to take it off the budget.

Daniel Satinsky: Would you replace that with gifts?

Evelyn Messinger: Right, gifts. The great thing about the U.S. government is that if you're 5 or 10% over or under, they don't care. They'll just give you the money. Anyway, finally, maybe it was 2001 or 2. Manana had done this a million times. She's coming back and declares she has €10,000. They pull her over and say €10,000 is more than $10,000. So, you're smuggling money into Russia. I don't know if they put her in jail, but they went to the office and confiscated all the computers. They told Manana she could go to jail or leave the country. So, she left the country and had to live in Paris for years. You know how Russians are. They then proceeded to dismantle the entire network. They made it illegal for any foreign money. I understand not having U.S. government money running media in Russia. That's one reason I'm glad we were not contractors. They'd start coming to us going, oh, there's going to be an election in Romania. Could you help us promote the right guy?

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.

Evelyn Messinger: Anyway, to make a long story short, they dismantled everything. Every one of those stations was either shut or was compromised. They agreed to follow the party line or shut down. With the exception of Echo of Moscow radio station, there's hardly any independent media in the country now.

Daniel Satinsky: What about the TV station, the Rain?

Evelyn Messinger: It works in Moscow only.

Daniel Satinsky: No, I think it's national, but it might be an internet station, actually. On the internet, there's a pretty free exchange. But they're tightening that as well.

Evelyn Messinger: They will. My impression these days in Russia is you can say anything as long as you don't broadcast it. People can criticize the government left and right. But you can't do anything about it. So, it's better than the old days, but still.

Daniel Satinsky: Oh yeah. So certainly, on the internet there is still access to lots of information.

Evelyn Messinger: Manana eventually moved back to Moscow. She now advises art groups and such.

Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay. She must have gotten a signal that it was okay to move back.

Evelyn Messinger: It was like four years later. They wouldn't let her back. It was terrible. The whole thing was terrible. It was really sad to see it all dismantled and turned to dust. In Eastern Europe, it's better. Not in Hungary, of course, but in certain places it really did stick.

Daniel Satinsky: What about Poland? Is it a problem in Poland, too?

Evelyn Messinger: You know, I'm not sure anymore. They now have a right-wing guy running it.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, they've had that for a while.

Evelyn Messinger: The template is to stop those guys from broadcasting. You regain control over it, so I don't know.

Daniel Satinsky: So when you were doing this training, was it USAID money or Soros money?

Evelyn Messinger: All of it. Truthfully, there was always more money from the US government than anyone else. But as an independent nonprofit, they really couldn't make us do anything except stop giving us money. They tried to convince us to do propaganda, not really, but to get involved in elections. We refused to cover elections. We did train some journalists in covering elections, but we ourselves would not get involved in any of that. The trainers were always scrupulously really good journalists.

Daniel Satinsky: Where would the training take place? Inside Russia, or would you bring them to California?

Evelyn Messinger: They came sometimes, but it was mostly inside Russia. The great majority of it was. David would know more, but I know some of the trainers pretty well. One of our guys who was a trainer is now a writer. I could put you in touch with him. He's a smart guy and speaks Russian too. One great thing we did was with CNN. They had a training program for their international journalists in Atlanta. I somehow arranged with Soros to get Eastern Europeans to be part of that. Even though technically they weren’t supposed to, nobody cared. We sent people through this course at CNN to watch how they operated.

Daniel Satinsky: Very interesting. So, this sort of citizen diplomacy morphed into independent journalism.

Evelyn Messinger: Yeah.

Daniel Satinsky: Were you formally connected to any peace or anti-nuclear organizations?

Evelyn Messinger: We were media people. They were part of our programming.

Daniel Satinsky: Right, so you got content and information from these organizations.

Evelyn Messinger: Yeah. If we did TV programs or anything, we'd interview people and generate shows. I personally wasn't connected. Kim was always more of an activist than I was. I was more on the journalism side. There are movements and then there's media. I'm less and less convinced that activist media is a good idea. As you get older, you see where everything leads.

Daniel Satinsky: That's a problem, isn't it? So, in 1990, when you were starting to discover all this independent media, what did you think things would look like in the next ten years? Did you think there would be a growing independent media network?

Evelyn Messinger: I personally was never convinced that the network would be that cohesive. There'd be some programs distributed out to the network, and there were satellite issues that I wasn't much involved with. But I thought because we were able to get involved in writing the laws in Eastern Europe — when I say we, it was local, really brainy media legal types — they'd get all involved. Manana was doing the same thing in Russia. In Eastern Europe, it stuck more. We never thought it would disappear the way it has in Russia. Completely disappeared. Some of the guys from that first meeting Liz put together are multimillionaires now. They kept their stations, but from the beginning, the news was always sort of a side thing for them. They were more interested in entertainment, getting foreign TV shows on their stations, and producing their own programs. There was always an inherent tension because we were more like PBS types. There was always that.

Daniel Satinsky: I know Peter Gerwe got involved with Story Time, a media company in Russia.

Evelyn Messinger: Yeah. He went off into commercial media. I don't know much about it, except that's what happened. You should probably talk to him.

Daniel Satinsky: But he wasn't involved with your network at all?

Evelyn Messinger: I don't think so. Although Anya brought him up when I told her I was talking to you. She had something to do with him. I remember him calling me when I was working for Soros, pitching for money. I met him a couple of times.

Daniel Satinsky: Okay. So, while you were doing your independent media, MTV Russia was being formed at the same time?

Evelyn Messinger: Oh, MTV Russia, no idea.

Daniel Satinsky: My understanding was that the people who put that network together went around and watched local stations and put together a network of local stations, which they branded as MTV.

Evelyn Messinger: That's probably true. David and Paul Greenberg would know about these things. At a certain point, I left Internews. There was so much government money, and it was distorting what we were. I had to choose, so I left and started my own little Internews Interactive. My own company.

Daniel Satinsky: Is Internews still around?

Evelyn Messinger: Oh yeah, it's huge. They're not in Russia at all, but they took this formula and went all over the world. They expanded into many areas, including climate journalism. Some of it's really impressive work in places like Myanmar.

Daniel Satinsky: My story is about American involvement in Russia. This relationship is much more complex than it is portrayed.