#Citizen Diplomacy #Media
Communications Law Project, Track Two, Heart to Heart
Lizbeth Hasse is an international lawyer, arbitrator, mediator and negotiator, with a deep expertise in intellectual property, entertainment and technology law. She was involved with citizen diplomacy programs in the 1980’s that led to working relationships with the Soviet film industry and after the collapse of the Soviet Union with Russian filmmakers and the early independent media sector. She structured and negotiated multinational productions, enterprises and joint ventures including with USSR and Russian parties in ventures involving oil well reclamation, medical devices, film distribution, trademark licensing and other areas.
While Director of the Communications Law Project in the1990’s, she participated in projects involving copyright, trademark, and communications legislation in the USSR and Russia, multiple Eastern European, African and Asian countries. She was an active member of the Policy for Culture committee of experts, a partnership of UNESCO and IFESCCO focused on the CIS in 2009-10. She is a founding director of Heart to Heart Global Cardiac Care where she helped design a sustainable international medical clinical and training program operating for over 35 years, which began in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Communications Law Project, Track Two, Heart to Heart
Lizbeth Hasse is an international lawyer, arbitrator, mediator and negotiator, with a deep expertise in intellectual property, entertainment and technology law. She was involved with citizen diplomacy programs in the 1980’s that led to working relationships with the Soviet film industry and after the collapse of the Soviet Union with Russian filmmakers and the early independent media sector. She structured and negotiated multinational productions, enterprises and joint ventures including with USSR and Russian parties in ventures involving oil well reclamation, medical devices, film distribution, trademark licensing and other areas.
While Director of the Communications Law Project in the1990’s, she participated in projects involving copyright, trademark, and communications legislation in the USSR and Russia, multiple Eastern European, African and Asian countries. She was an active member of the Policy for Culture committee of experts, a partnership of UNESCO and IFESCCO focused on the CIS in 2009-10. She is a founding director of Heart to Heart Global Cardiac Care where she helped design a sustainable international medical clinical and training program operating for over 35 years, which began in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Daniel Satinsky: I don’t know much about you. I don’t know how you came to be interested in Russia, I don’t know your involvement, so if you could start from that and sort of march chronologically, and I’ll interrupt you with questions about things that I’m interested in or I don’t understand from what you’re saying.
Lizbeth Hasse: Okay. Yeah, I think my experience will be similar and have its own idiosyncrasies compared to many others you’ve talked to. I’ve been to Russia probably 70 times, and always for some kind of professional business or citizen-to-citizen diplomacy type effort. My profession is as a lawyer, and I’ve been a lawyer for several nonprofits, and also media, film projects that have gone on there. So my first venture and interest began, was launched from the Telluride Film Festival, where I frequently attended. I am an advisor to them and do some legal licensing work for them.
And in 1988 I met there two Estonians, an Estonian filmmaker named Mark Soosaar and another — I can’t remember his name right now. I should have looked, but I can’t. And they invited me to come to Estonia to talk to the Estonian filmmakers union because the Estonians felt like they were going to be able to do independent business with the West and not have to go through Moscow to do that, and they wanted an entertainment lawyer to come and talk to them about how deals are made, and how entertainment, film business is structured in the West, and how rights work.
Daniel Satinsky: That’s pretty advanced understanding and forward thinking at that point, wasn’t it?
Lizbeth Hasse: Well, Estonians always felt they were separate, and they did—yes, it was, but these were also professionals whose work was distributed internationally, so they had run into these issues and didn’t know how to deal with them.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I see.
Lizbeth Hasse: For filmmakers who had an international audience, they’re mostly involved in ethnographic stuff, which Estonia was big on, and protecting small cultures, and so that’s what the focus was of that. And I went there, and on the way back I also went to Moscow and met there, because I had made contacts with a couple of Russians, again through the Telluride Film Festival, which is a really strong international event, with the head of the Soviet filmmakers’ union, Andrei Smirnov. And he felt he wanted a similar kind of program for his constituency in Moscow. And I gave a couple of talks there and talked about rights and distribution things.
And then I ended up being sort of coordinating producer—when I was in Estonia, I met a filmmaker from the United States who was doing a film about the first seder in 50 years in Estonia, and he asked me to be his coordinating producer on that because I knew, by that point knew a few people in Estonia on a professional standpoint. So that was my next trip over there. And then also a follow-up trip to Moscow with the filmmakers’ union there.
And interestingly enough, at that point—that was ’89—I was there during the elections for the filmmakers’ union, and they elected their first non-Muscovite as head of the filmmakers’ union to show their own diversity, and they elected a fellow named Davlat Khudonazarov, who was also on the Duma. He was a member of Sakharov’s committee on the Duma, and a quite progressive and forward-thinking person from Tajikistan. He became a very close friend, as did Andrei Smirnov, who was retiring from being head of the filmmakers’ union, and they still are friends today.
In fact, fast forward, a little tangent on Davlat Khudonazarov. He ran for the first president of the independent Tajikistan and was a very popular candidate. He lost in what was clearly a corrupted election. But he essentially remained in exile from Tajikistan for the rest of his current life.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow. Yeah. That’s a story, yeah.
Lizbeth Hasse: So that was quite a passage there. I wrote a couple articles about him and observed his election, went on some of the campaigning, and also had an interesting time giving a talk, at one point, to a group of about 3,000 soldiers on the Afghan border about democracy.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa! [Laughs.]
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, so that was kind of an odd moment.
Daniel Satinsky: What language did you give that talk in?
Lizbeth Hasse: I gave it in English with an interpreter.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, okay.
Lizbeth Hasse: But it was…you know, and it really doesn’t go into your business side, but it was a very different view of a population, that demographic in that large arena or hall where the soldiers were. You could just look at these groups in the audience, and there were dark Uzbeks, and then you could see that was the group of Belarus, you know, they were all kind of clustered by their republic or their constituency throughout that audience. It was quite interesting. And they happened to have, you know, the commander of their particular outpost was somebody who believed in perestroika, and wanted them to learn about the United States, so that’s why I spoke.
Daniel Satinsky: What year was that?
Lizbeth Hasse: That must have been ’90.
Daniel Satinsky: ’90, yeah. Wow. That was very early in all this process, huh? So how did you find yourself there in 1990 on the border? Is that connected with—
Lizbeth Hasse: Well, I don’t know if it’s the end of ’90. I mean, I’ve got to get these dates probably straight for you at some point because there’s so many back and forth. And Davlat was running for president, and he was conducting a campaign along the southern part of Tajikistan, and that’s why we were there.
Daniel Satinsky: I see, okay.
Lizbeth Hasse: I also, sort of parallel to this, I started…in ’89 I was asked by a group out of Oakland that was starting a medical project — it started as a single medical treatment of a young girl aged six who needed heart surgery that she couldn’t get safely in Leningrad, and she was brought over to Oakland Children’s Hospital for open heart surgery, and had a very successful outcome. The nice thing about her was that the little girl spoke English because both of her parents were interpreters and translators of films in Leningrad, and so she was very photogenic for the television, and the day after she had her operation she was running around Oakland Children’s Hospital and speaking English.
So I made the acquaintance with them and the group eventually became Heart to Heart Global Cardiac Care. The group that brought her over asked me to help them with some — after this doctor, Dr. Nilas Young, had operated on the young girl, he received, in the following months, about 2,000 letters from parents all over Russia asking him to operate on their children.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, my god.
Lizbeth Hasse: And he said we can’t do that at Oakland Children’s Hospital, so let’s try to train the doctors there to do this kind of operation on newborns and young children because it becomes more and more dangerous as kids get older to have the kind of operations that this kid needed, and it’s not unusual for kids to be born with heart defects that are treatable.
So that was the point, was to train doctors throughout the Soviet Union in these pediatric cardiac surgery procedures. And we started with an initial mission to St. Petersburg, to Leningrad, and I came along to organize media, because media was very interested, and I knew people, at that point knew people in television, and they needed somebody non-medical to kind of coordinate that stuff while they were doing their own work, and so I came along. I’m now, I’ve been on the board of directors of that group now for however long it’s been, almost 40 years, I guess.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
Lizbeth Hasse: And we’ve probably saved the lives of 30,000 kids. I mean, you can look up our website and get the fuller story, but it’s an ongoing good, solid group, and we started five cardiac centers for excellence throughout all of Russia—not in Moscow where they did probably have good care, but outside of Moscow in major cities, in Kazan, Kaliningrad, Tomsk. St. Petersburg was the first one, Children’s Hospital. We also coordinated with the military there. They had a very broadminded, interesting cardiac surgeon at the military hospital when we started, and he was the one who really facilitated the early work of the group and the ability to bring equipment in and that sort of thing.
Daniel Satinsky: Can I ask you a question about that? How did Soviet doctors react to being taught by Americans? Was there some national pride issue, or were they just interested in professional knowledge, and this was an opportunity? Do you know what I’m asking you?
Lizbeth Hasse: I don’t think there was a national pride issue. I mean, we had a very sensitive, good group, too, as far as that goes. I mean, Dr. Young was not an egomaniac at all, and we didn’t have a particularly egotistical group of doctors. It was very much side-by-side. The military doctors were of the highest caliber. There was no question that the doctors were of the highest caliber and training. When we went there they had no equipment whatsoever — no supplies and broken-down equipment. So we brought with us technicians who fixed the equipment, and we brought supplies. So the understanding was more about lack of resources than any kind of lack of knowledge.
And they enjoyed working side-by-side. We also brought, over the years have brought quite a few doctors here to work at Mayo, and Johns Hopkins, and train here, so I don’t think there’s ever been a sense of a top-down situation at all there. I guess the two strongest doctors that we trained from when they were quite young to kind of be our key people coordinating their own teams in Russia, both of them ended up leaving Russia, unfortunately. One went off to Dubai eventually and the other went to Israel. But we developed new relationships with strong people. But those were two people that we had invested a great deal of time in. They have nonetheless joined us on trips.
We currently have a project in Armenia that was just disrupted this last year, of course, but there’s a doctor we trained in Kaliningrad who now helps to lead up the teams that go to Armenia, and there’s been a lot of effort for cross pollination there. And we’re doing work in South America for the first time, wanting to branch to some other places, and a couple of Russian doctors will join in that effort. So there hasn’t been a nationalistic sense in it.
Daniel Satinsky: So, it isn’t a reaction to like this is an American program, this is a professional program, and sort of mutual benefit —
Lizbeth Hasse: I think there was a lot of excitement when we first went about Americans coming. You know, it was ’89 and ’90, and there was all that excitement about Americans, especially in a city like Leningrad. But no, professionally it’s been a very horizontal process.
Daniel Satinsky: But it sounds like in the process you’ve developed a lot of lasting personal relationships of the people involved.
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. And the couple that are the parents of the young girl who’s now in her 30s and is a friend, and I used to stay at their house quite a bit in St. Petersburg and at their dacha* outside.
So yeah, there’s been a lot of friends developed there, and also with the doctors. And other people I know have turned to me, people from Russia have turned to me when they know someone who has a heart problem and wants some advice and wants to kind of get some referral through Heart to Heart for what to do in Russia as well, so that’s been part of the medical work.
So that’s something that’s continued. Business-wise I had a few trips. I did an interest on a client from San Francisco who now is deceased. His name was Hal Morgan. Hal had a large industrial equipment company involved a lot with large dump trucks, cement mixers and things like that. And he got interested in an oil well restoration project in Siberia, along with an American billionaire at the time, and an Israeli billionaire. He wasn’t quite of their financial league, but he was a well-to-do, successful businessman.
So the three of them joined together thinking they might do a project involving the reclaiming and restoration of a bunch of oil wells outside of Nizhnevartovsk in Siberia, and I went with them and drew up some preliminary agreements and that sort of thing. And actually, a sort of doctor, business, PhD guy from Moscow that I had met through Heart to Heart came along with us. He was some kind of liaison. That project never really got off the ground, as I think a lot don’t, but it was interesting. There was a big team of Americans from Texas under Schlumberger that were out there working in the oil fields and, you know, men who hadn’t brought enough clothing and were really freezing. I mean, it was ridiculous.
Daniel Satinsky: They came from Texas to Siberia and didn’t quite grasp the climate.
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. And I remember at the commissary they were eating out of—they had, you know, all these little packets of ketchup. They were trying to eat their own diet. They were really suffering out there. But, you know, I mean, a bunch of big men just trying to make do and see if they could make some money.
And I think probably the particular oil wells they were given to work in weren’t very promising anyway, and at some point —
Daniel Satinsky: That would make sense. That would make sense that they wouldn’t be given the best, they’d be given the worst and say hey, see what you can do.
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, see what you can do. And at some point, Hal and the other two guys decided that it wasn’t worth it, but they enjoyed the adventure, I think. So, there was —
Daniel Satinsky: Let me interrupt you a second. So, it sounds like what happened is through an account with these Estonians you gradually became known as a go-to person for Russia, that people associated you as someone who knew people and could help them get things done. Is that probably —
Lizbeth Hasse: I think it’s through the bar. You know, at that point there was a lot of interest in business opportunities in the Soviet Union, and I’m fairly well-known — not well-known, but I have a lot of colleagues in the San Francisco bar, and they’d say oh well, you know, see if Liz Hasse knows somebody, or I know she’s been there on business and blah-blah-blah, so that’s how that would… And then it’s true that the Heart to Heart relationship and what we did built a lot of goodwill, both on this side and inside the Soviet Union, so that was significant. I then, in — and I’m not sure if this is — ’90 I put together a SpaceBridge. I was approached by some ecologists from St. Petersburg who I met at Henry Dakin—does that name mean something to you?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, it does.
Lizbeth Hasse: Okay. Yeah, I think my experience will be similar and have its own idiosyncrasies compared to many others you’ve talked to. I’ve been to Russia probably 70 times, and always for some kind of professional business or citizen-to-citizen diplomacy type effort. My profession is as a lawyer, and I’ve been a lawyer for several nonprofits, and also media, film projects that have gone on there. So my first venture and interest began, was launched from the Telluride Film Festival, where I frequently attended. I am an advisor to them and do some legal licensing work for them.
And in 1988 I met there two Estonians, an Estonian filmmaker named Mark Soosaar and another — I can’t remember his name right now. I should have looked, but I can’t. And they invited me to come to Estonia to talk to the Estonian filmmakers union because the Estonians felt like they were going to be able to do independent business with the West and not have to go through Moscow to do that, and they wanted an entertainment lawyer to come and talk to them about how deals are made, and how entertainment, film business is structured in the West, and how rights work.
Daniel Satinsky: That’s pretty advanced understanding and forward thinking at that point, wasn’t it?
Lizbeth Hasse: Well, Estonians always felt they were separate, and they did—yes, it was, but these were also professionals whose work was distributed internationally, so they had run into these issues and didn’t know how to deal with them.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I see.
Lizbeth Hasse: For filmmakers who had an international audience, they’re mostly involved in ethnographic stuff, which Estonia was big on, and protecting small cultures, and so that’s what the focus was of that. And I went there, and on the way back I also went to Moscow and met there, because I had made contacts with a couple of Russians, again through the Telluride Film Festival, which is a really strong international event, with the head of the Soviet filmmakers’ union, Andrei Smirnov. And he felt he wanted a similar kind of program for his constituency in Moscow. And I gave a couple of talks there and talked about rights and distribution things.
And then I ended up being sort of coordinating producer—when I was in Estonia, I met a filmmaker from the United States who was doing a film about the first seder in 50 years in Estonia, and he asked me to be his coordinating producer on that because I knew, by that point knew a few people in Estonia on a professional standpoint. So that was my next trip over there. And then also a follow-up trip to Moscow with the filmmakers’ union there.
And interestingly enough, at that point—that was ’89—I was there during the elections for the filmmakers’ union, and they elected their first non-Muscovite as head of the filmmakers’ union to show their own diversity, and they elected a fellow named Davlat Khudonazarov, who was also on the Duma. He was a member of Sakharov’s committee on the Duma, and a quite progressive and forward-thinking person from Tajikistan. He became a very close friend, as did Andrei Smirnov, who was retiring from being head of the filmmakers’ union, and they still are friends today.
In fact, fast forward, a little tangent on Davlat Khudonazarov. He ran for the first president of the independent Tajikistan and was a very popular candidate. He lost in what was clearly a corrupted election. But he essentially remained in exile from Tajikistan for the rest of his current life.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow. Yeah. That’s a story, yeah.
Lizbeth Hasse: So that was quite a passage there. I wrote a couple articles about him and observed his election, went on some of the campaigning, and also had an interesting time giving a talk, at one point, to a group of about 3,000 soldiers on the Afghan border about democracy.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa! [Laughs.]
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, so that was kind of an odd moment.
Daniel Satinsky: What language did you give that talk in?
Lizbeth Hasse: I gave it in English with an interpreter.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, okay.
Lizbeth Hasse: But it was…you know, and it really doesn’t go into your business side, but it was a very different view of a population, that demographic in that large arena or hall where the soldiers were. You could just look at these groups in the audience, and there were dark Uzbeks, and then you could see that was the group of Belarus, you know, they were all kind of clustered by their republic or their constituency throughout that audience. It was quite interesting. And they happened to have, you know, the commander of their particular outpost was somebody who believed in perestroika, and wanted them to learn about the United States, so that’s why I spoke.
Daniel Satinsky: What year was that?
Lizbeth Hasse: That must have been ’90.
Daniel Satinsky: ’90, yeah. Wow. That was very early in all this process, huh? So how did you find yourself there in 1990 on the border? Is that connected with—
Lizbeth Hasse: Well, I don’t know if it’s the end of ’90. I mean, I’ve got to get these dates probably straight for you at some point because there’s so many back and forth. And Davlat was running for president, and he was conducting a campaign along the southern part of Tajikistan, and that’s why we were there.
Daniel Satinsky: I see, okay.
Lizbeth Hasse: I also, sort of parallel to this, I started…in ’89 I was asked by a group out of Oakland that was starting a medical project — it started as a single medical treatment of a young girl aged six who needed heart surgery that she couldn’t get safely in Leningrad, and she was brought over to Oakland Children’s Hospital for open heart surgery, and had a very successful outcome. The nice thing about her was that the little girl spoke English because both of her parents were interpreters and translators of films in Leningrad, and so she was very photogenic for the television, and the day after she had her operation she was running around Oakland Children’s Hospital and speaking English.
So I made the acquaintance with them and the group eventually became Heart to Heart Global Cardiac Care. The group that brought her over asked me to help them with some — after this doctor, Dr. Nilas Young, had operated on the young girl, he received, in the following months, about 2,000 letters from parents all over Russia asking him to operate on their children.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, my god.
Lizbeth Hasse: And he said we can’t do that at Oakland Children’s Hospital, so let’s try to train the doctors there to do this kind of operation on newborns and young children because it becomes more and more dangerous as kids get older to have the kind of operations that this kid needed, and it’s not unusual for kids to be born with heart defects that are treatable.
So that was the point, was to train doctors throughout the Soviet Union in these pediatric cardiac surgery procedures. And we started with an initial mission to St. Petersburg, to Leningrad, and I came along to organize media, because media was very interested, and I knew people, at that point knew people in television, and they needed somebody non-medical to kind of coordinate that stuff while they were doing their own work, and so I came along. I’m now, I’ve been on the board of directors of that group now for however long it’s been, almost 40 years, I guess.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
Lizbeth Hasse: And we’ve probably saved the lives of 30,000 kids. I mean, you can look up our website and get the fuller story, but it’s an ongoing good, solid group, and we started five cardiac centers for excellence throughout all of Russia—not in Moscow where they did probably have good care, but outside of Moscow in major cities, in Kazan, Kaliningrad, Tomsk. St. Petersburg was the first one, Children’s Hospital. We also coordinated with the military there. They had a very broadminded, interesting cardiac surgeon at the military hospital when we started, and he was the one who really facilitated the early work of the group and the ability to bring equipment in and that sort of thing.
Daniel Satinsky: Can I ask you a question about that? How did Soviet doctors react to being taught by Americans? Was there some national pride issue, or were they just interested in professional knowledge, and this was an opportunity? Do you know what I’m asking you?
Lizbeth Hasse: I don’t think there was a national pride issue. I mean, we had a very sensitive, good group, too, as far as that goes. I mean, Dr. Young was not an egomaniac at all, and we didn’t have a particularly egotistical group of doctors. It was very much side-by-side. The military doctors were of the highest caliber. There was no question that the doctors were of the highest caliber and training. When we went there they had no equipment whatsoever — no supplies and broken-down equipment. So we brought with us technicians who fixed the equipment, and we brought supplies. So the understanding was more about lack of resources than any kind of lack of knowledge.
And they enjoyed working side-by-side. We also brought, over the years have brought quite a few doctors here to work at Mayo, and Johns Hopkins, and train here, so I don’t think there’s ever been a sense of a top-down situation at all there. I guess the two strongest doctors that we trained from when they were quite young to kind of be our key people coordinating their own teams in Russia, both of them ended up leaving Russia, unfortunately. One went off to Dubai eventually and the other went to Israel. But we developed new relationships with strong people. But those were two people that we had invested a great deal of time in. They have nonetheless joined us on trips.
We currently have a project in Armenia that was just disrupted this last year, of course, but there’s a doctor we trained in Kaliningrad who now helps to lead up the teams that go to Armenia, and there’s been a lot of effort for cross pollination there. And we’re doing work in South America for the first time, wanting to branch to some other places, and a couple of Russian doctors will join in that effort. So there hasn’t been a nationalistic sense in it.
Daniel Satinsky: So, it isn’t a reaction to like this is an American program, this is a professional program, and sort of mutual benefit —
Lizbeth Hasse: I think there was a lot of excitement when we first went about Americans coming. You know, it was ’89 and ’90, and there was all that excitement about Americans, especially in a city like Leningrad. But no, professionally it’s been a very horizontal process.
Daniel Satinsky: But it sounds like in the process you’ve developed a lot of lasting personal relationships of the people involved.
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. And the couple that are the parents of the young girl who’s now in her 30s and is a friend, and I used to stay at their house quite a bit in St. Petersburg and at their dacha* outside.
So yeah, there’s been a lot of friends developed there, and also with the doctors. And other people I know have turned to me, people from Russia have turned to me when they know someone who has a heart problem and wants some advice and wants to kind of get some referral through Heart to Heart for what to do in Russia as well, so that’s been part of the medical work.
So that’s something that’s continued. Business-wise I had a few trips. I did an interest on a client from San Francisco who now is deceased. His name was Hal Morgan. Hal had a large industrial equipment company involved a lot with large dump trucks, cement mixers and things like that. And he got interested in an oil well restoration project in Siberia, along with an American billionaire at the time, and an Israeli billionaire. He wasn’t quite of their financial league, but he was a well-to-do, successful businessman.
So the three of them joined together thinking they might do a project involving the reclaiming and restoration of a bunch of oil wells outside of Nizhnevartovsk in Siberia, and I went with them and drew up some preliminary agreements and that sort of thing. And actually, a sort of doctor, business, PhD guy from Moscow that I had met through Heart to Heart came along with us. He was some kind of liaison. That project never really got off the ground, as I think a lot don’t, but it was interesting. There was a big team of Americans from Texas under Schlumberger that were out there working in the oil fields and, you know, men who hadn’t brought enough clothing and were really freezing. I mean, it was ridiculous.
Daniel Satinsky: They came from Texas to Siberia and didn’t quite grasp the climate.
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. And I remember at the commissary they were eating out of—they had, you know, all these little packets of ketchup. They were trying to eat their own diet. They were really suffering out there. But, you know, I mean, a bunch of big men just trying to make do and see if they could make some money.
And I think probably the particular oil wells they were given to work in weren’t very promising anyway, and at some point —
Daniel Satinsky: That would make sense. That would make sense that they wouldn’t be given the best, they’d be given the worst and say hey, see what you can do.
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, see what you can do. And at some point, Hal and the other two guys decided that it wasn’t worth it, but they enjoyed the adventure, I think. So, there was —
Daniel Satinsky: Let me interrupt you a second. So, it sounds like what happened is through an account with these Estonians you gradually became known as a go-to person for Russia, that people associated you as someone who knew people and could help them get things done. Is that probably —
Lizbeth Hasse: I think it’s through the bar. You know, at that point there was a lot of interest in business opportunities in the Soviet Union, and I’m fairly well-known — not well-known, but I have a lot of colleagues in the San Francisco bar, and they’d say oh well, you know, see if Liz Hasse knows somebody, or I know she’s been there on business and blah-blah-blah, so that’s how that would… And then it’s true that the Heart to Heart relationship and what we did built a lot of goodwill, both on this side and inside the Soviet Union, so that was significant. I then, in — and I’m not sure if this is — ’90 I put together a SpaceBridge. I was approached by some ecologists from St. Petersburg who I met at Henry Dakin—does that name mean something to you?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, it does.
Lizbeth Hasse: Okay. I met them at Henry Dakin’s center in San Francisco, and they were very upset about a dam that was being built across the Baltic that was going to block part of the Baltic just outside of St. Petersburg and the environmental effects of it, and they wanted to try to have a SpaceBridge about environmental activism and how it’s done. And I organized the studio audiences for both sides.
Here we had some pretty prominent people in — we had prominent local ecologists involved in the San Francisco Bay such as the Baykeeper and a number of local, and we also had David Brewer on it, and the guy who started Earth Island, and Sierra Club head at the time, just a pretty powerful group on our side. And on their side, they got together the activists and citizens of St. Petersburg as well as the people involved in the construction of the dam, so they had a balanced side on their side. And that was an interesting effort to coordinate the SpaceBridge. I think what happened was… Internews had done some SpaceBridges at that time. Evelyn Messinger, you know her.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I interviewed Evelyn. Actually, that’s how I…she referred me to you.
Lizbeth Hasse: She and Kim Spencer asked me, you know, maybe — I asked them if they wanted to do this with me and they said no, you can probably do it. I think they were too busy and the environmental thing wasn’t right up their angle, but they introduced me to some satellite guys, they helped me out. And I did it with the local NBC station here in San Francisco. And i was supposed to organize it with a guy named Leonid Zolotarevsky in Moscow, who was the head of the international department at the national television, and he wanted to do it out of Moscow.
And I said well, you know, I’ve been talking to all these people in Leningrad, and they really wanted to it in Leningrad, that’s where the problem is. But he said, you know, it should be Moscow, and blah-blah-blah, you know, the whole central thing. And I was supposed to coordinate with Leningrad. He said, well, there’s no airplane flights there now, they’re all filled up, and i can’t get you a hotel in Leningrad, and I think we should just coordinate from Moscow.
And I did something that I—I don’t know if I would do it today—but I just said I think I can go there myself. So I rented a car, not knowing you’re not supposed to drive outside a certain part, so I just rented the car and I drove to Leningrad, and I met with the people, and they said they could do it. And then I drove back, and I met with Zolotarevsky, and I said you know, I met with the people, and they can do this, and this is what they do, and this is who would host. And he said well, listen, I don’t know anybody who ever drove to Leningrad, so you can do it.
Daniel Satinsky: [Laughs.] How did you rent a car in 1990?
Lizbeth Hasse: I just went to the fancy hotel there and rented a car. And nobody asked me where I was going to take it. I didn’t know I had to tell them I was going to drive out of the Moscow area, and I just —
Daniel Satinsky: You just got a roadmap and followed it?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. And it’s just a straight road, anyway. You know, but I didn’t really know the political, legal restrictions, really, until I met a couple out of the consulate there who said well, we can’t travel anywhere off this particular —
Daniel Satinsky: Right. But they had special rules.
Lizbeth Hasse: Oh, yeah. No, they had special rules —
Daniel Satinsky: And the Soviet diplomats had the same rules in the U.S. There was only restricted areas they could visit. But anyway. So this is still Soviet times, right?
Lizbeth Hasse: This is still Soviet times. And, you know, I mean, things were pretty easy to deal with in Soviet times. I mean, there was the Soviet — there was a mentality that was old-fashioned that you dealt with, the naysaying and stuff, and then there were a lot of people who were just excited to try something new, the younger people, or business people, or some of the bureaucrats, so there were a lot of opportunities and a lot of sense of goodwill. And then I guess… You know, during this time most of my contacts are in the media, film thing. I got a lot of invitations to various republics. I think I’ve been to all of them now except for Turkmenistan.
Daniel Satinsky: Turkmenistan. [Laughs.]
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. And I went there, you know, working on legal projects, civil law projects, talking about intellectual property laws mostly and media stuff.
Daniel Satinsky: And you were being paid by local people, or you were getting USAID money, or how were you doing this?
Lizbeth Hasse: I got USAID — actually, it was pre-USAID. What was that called? You know what it was. Anyway. The incarnation before they put them inside the State Department. I had that money. I had been a Fulbright in ’86 and ’87 in France and had a lot of contacts in the State Department as a result. They’d sent me, actually, way back then to do a lot of work in Francophone Africa.
And I had invitations, mostly invitations from the filmmakers’ unions, and they would pay for just coming.
Daniel Satinsky: Did you ever license any films in that Soviet period?
Lizbeth Hasse: I worked on some…yes, I did. I worked on some contracts for people putting their stuff in…out of Mosfilm* for film festivals and also some television contracts. I still do that, but it’s a different—now it’s for individuals and for production companies, permissions for things and stuff. In fact, I’m working on one right now. So yes. I also…let me see, I was thinking.
Through the media stuff I organized…I’m trying to think of how this happened. Oh, I met a lawyer in Leningrad who was helpful with some of the Heart to Heart stuff and invited me to speak a few times with his faculty, and he was interested in speech issues and communications and things. And we put together, or he asked me to put together and make him my co-director of a conference, a multi-day conference in Novgorod, out of which a lot of independent or trying to be independent film, TV companies came, and smaller TV companies from different regions and republics came to that. We had about close to 200 companies that came to that conference.
And they formed an organization they called the Independent Broadcasting Association, something like that. It doesn’t exist anymore, but they did form that. I brought along with me a producer that I knew from France, and he put together some French professionals, too, because I didn’t want it to be U.S.-Soviet. So we had a German and a Finnish guy, and this group from France, and our American group, and these people from all over the Soviet Union. I think it was a pretty powerful three or four days.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, that’s, I mean, what’s interesting is to see how much activity there was before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The citizen activity was bubbling up, so to speak, right?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. Oh, there was a lot, yeah. Somehow, I think my activity was more intense during that time than afterwards.
Daniel Satinsky: Really? What do you mean?
Lizbeth Hasse: I don’t know. I mean, maybe it was just my own, the course of my own work and stuff, and so many trips, and after a while you’re always in a state of jet lag, and you have to start to be a little more judicious about your time and not go more than once a month and, you know. So that happened.
Daniel Satinsky: And you were going that often a lot because of interest as much as you were making money doing this — you were making some, but this was —
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, I didn’t make a lot of money. I spent money. But there were jobs. I mean, you know, Hal Morgan and his folks paid me, and I got…certainly didn’t…you know, people paid expenses, and then I would get jobs out of stuff, but most of the money came from the American side. And even with the Heart to Heart stuff, which obviously was a nonprofit, that was always funded from the American side. There was not a lot of sense of charitable funding or the notion of it in the Soviet Union, although people gave enormous amounts of time, and cars, and food, and all that, but all the funding was from the American side.
Daniel Satinsky: From the American side, yeah, yeah. But still a lot was going on. There was a lot of contact in that period. Much more than anyone would have thought by the notion of the iron curtain, and…
Lizbeth Hasse: There was enormous, yeah. And then I was asked to, invited by Michael and Dulce Murphy to be on their Track II program. Have you spoken to them?
So, Track II was a great place to meet people, too. Abel Aganbegyan was on the board for a while, and they brought Yeltsin over on his first trip to the United States.
Daniel Satinsky: Is the famous grocery store in Texas the visit?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. And, you know, but those are little flashpoints. But they’ve had steady work. They developed the library for the psychology department at University of Moscow. They’ve had some very steady, long-term projects and relationships. And I did meet people, and I introduced Davlat Khudonazarov to that group, and he joined their advisory board. Oh, I also work with a number of literary people who had publishing issues and publishing deals in the United States, including Viktor Yerofeyev. I don’t know if that name means anything to you. He was a bestselling novelist for a while from there, wrote “Russian Beauty.” And he also joined the advisory part of Track II. And I did meet other literary folks through him. And so that’s been a little business stable, too.
I had a business project for a company in Oakland called Mayer Laboratories. We went to Siberia quite a few times. Mayer Laboratories distributes condoms, and they have their own brand. The brand they developed here was called Kimono. And they had decided that they wanted to try to manufacture condoms, put together a condom manufacturing project in Russia, in Siberia. And we looked at a lot of old, run-down, half built, would-be factory warehouses that were rusting out in various places and had never come to anything, and then ultimately decided it wasn’t going to work in Siberia because you had to import stuff from Malaysia that couldn’t really travel in the weather, and I don’t know, it just… The logistics were too difficult for the manufacturing part. We ended up putting together a company in Ukraine to distribute condoms and to distribute quality condoms. The problem, when we started the condoms in the Soviet Union were very low quality. Basically, they had holes.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, there were lots of jokes about that.
Lizbeth Hasse: And we were supposed to—one of the early things we were supposed to do was we got a donation of a whole lot of condoms from Planned Parenthood in the U.K. to bring to Russia, and I think the Russians — and here I do think it was a nationalistic spirit — they weren’t too happy to get these, their health ministry decided they had to test them, and I don’t know what. The rumor was they fed them to rats, and the rats’ eyes got red, and so we couldn’t distribute the condoms. But I don’t know really what happened. But we weren’t allowed to distribute what were perfectly good, high quality condoms.
Daniel Satinsky: And what year was that?
Lizbeth Hasse: I’m thinking that was ’92 [Subsequent note of correction: 1994].
Daniel Satinsky: So, it was after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you had to cross national borders between Ukraine and Russia.
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. It may have been ’93 [Subsequent note of correction: 1994], and I’d have to check that, too. So, we ended up having an extensive project with the Ministry of Health in Ukraine and Kyiv, and putting together this distribution plant, which operated for some time. I think it did make a little money. It ultimately, I think when it started to make money it was nationalized and Ukrainians took it over, and my client lost his investment. But basically, it was more of a hobby for them. They had some hopes, I think, but it was not, you know, a [tragedy].
Daniel Satinsky: He was the supplier, then yeah, they — But back to the… So, you had been involved with all these Soviet people. Then the Soviet Union collapses. I mean, what were you thinking at that point about the collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union? Were excited, more opportunities, worried? What were you thinking?
Lizbeth Hasse: I don’t think it seemed like an unnatural step. I mean, it seemed like…you know, you have to bear in mind that although I went to a lot of places, and I actually also at one point drove from St. Petersburg to Minsk in a private car by myself, I was mostly in big cities intermingling with people who had an international viewpoint, and this was an exciting time for them, and it didn’t seem like it wasn’t a natural development.
Certainly Aganbeygyan, who was in our midst, took it in stride. Davlat Khudonazarov, who was on the Duma, and then ultimately ran for president of his country, until that terrible time of that, but during the collapse he was very close with Gorbachev. I think there was serious worry, concern as institutions changed quickly, and maybe collapsed, or radically changed, and what does that mean, but there was enough optimism that I think it was more a notion of change than collapse.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, okay. That’s a good point.
Lizbeth Hasse: I have always found the idea that the Soviet Union collapsed is something…as a misnomer.
I mean, I had seen a lot of dysfunctional institutions and empty shells, and when we first started working in the hospitals, we had a syphon draining out of the operating arena into the back of a toilet, and they were reusing suture threads, washing them. And so that, to me, is a state of collapse. That preceded this notion of political collapse.
Daniel Satinsky: The political collapse, yeah.
Lizbeth Hasse: So, no, I think to me it was a development, and there were a lot of things to do. I mean, there was a seriousness and concern about friends and how they were doing, and whether they were safe, but they were a little pooh-poohing about it, too, so… You know, I was interacting with people who were forward-looking in terms of change — filmmakers, media people who were just, you know, running to report on the next exciting event.
I remember one time one of the Estonians I had met had decided to do a journalism degree over here at the J school at Berkeley, and I let him stay at my house for a while while he was looking for a place, and then he decided just to go back because he said, you know, really everything is going on in the Soviet Union and there’s no point in being here. So it was…no, it was more of a time of opportunity. I don’t think I thought of it strictly as business opportunity, particularly. I mean, the business thing had always been risky and unstable, and it didn’t seem to be any better. But it was an expanding universe. That’s what it felt like.
Daniel Satinsky: And how long did it feel like that?
Lizbeth Hasse: That’s a good question. I remember being in Germany and feeling… For quite a while. I guess, you know, I did some work in Moldova. That was…
Daniel Satinsky: So at least through ’93, through the bombing of the Duma?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, definitely.
Daniel Satinsky: And after that?
Lizbeth Hasse: And beyond that, I mean, I was always seeing certain things that were developing and improving, but my trips there were mostly concentrated around the medical.
You know, the business stuff, after the condoms and the continuing business stuff, which for me has been in film and media, that’s been conducted on email and remotely. I haven’t needed to go. I mean, once you get these relationships it’s just like dealing with somebody in L.A., really, at that point.
And the trips were to help with the medical project, and in certain ways those became easier. But I think it had to do with our own sophistication, knowing who to deal with in the various ministry offices and district health departments, and having the familiarity, knowing people and going back to see them again. And the country just started to look better. They had the goodwill time in I don’t remember what year that was, and everything got gussied up in St. Petersburg, and then, you know, people were freely traveling. So, it’s not until the travel started to get more difficult, which is very recent.
Daniel Satinsky: Very recently. Let me go back to Mosfilm. So, you witnessed or at least from afar witnessed the real transformation of the film industry as well. I mean, Mosfilm went through bad times, internal struggles, fights over intellectual property, all kinds of things.
Lizbeth Hasse: Fights over buildings.
Also, one of the folks I work closely with has been the programmer for the Russian film festival, first Soviet Film International Film Festival and now Russian International Film Festival for many, many years. And we watched certain changes there, more internal in terms of who’s in charge, and Putin changing, you know, Putin coming in and changing heads of artistic institutions to the dismay of various people. That, I think, was…those are places where we saw change, but it was less focused towards Americans or whatever. And more about internal power struggle.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. But also, there was a period in which American films sort of dominated the market, both in terms of TV and in cassettes, and movies, and what was it, “Dallas” and contesting with the Mexican soap operas on Russian TV. So, I don’t know if you’ve had any sort of connection with —
Lizbeth Hasse: I was never making deals for Americans over there. I mean, those are established by large, you know, the Warner Brothers and the Disneys. They had their own relationships, and they always had, really.
Here we had some pretty prominent people in — we had prominent local ecologists involved in the San Francisco Bay such as the Baykeeper and a number of local, and we also had David Brewer on it, and the guy who started Earth Island, and Sierra Club head at the time, just a pretty powerful group on our side. And on their side, they got together the activists and citizens of St. Petersburg as well as the people involved in the construction of the dam, so they had a balanced side on their side. And that was an interesting effort to coordinate the SpaceBridge. I think what happened was… Internews had done some SpaceBridges at that time. Evelyn Messinger, you know her.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, I interviewed Evelyn. Actually, that’s how I…she referred me to you.
Lizbeth Hasse: She and Kim Spencer asked me, you know, maybe — I asked them if they wanted to do this with me and they said no, you can probably do it. I think they were too busy and the environmental thing wasn’t right up their angle, but they introduced me to some satellite guys, they helped me out. And I did it with the local NBC station here in San Francisco. And i was supposed to organize it with a guy named Leonid Zolotarevsky in Moscow, who was the head of the international department at the national television, and he wanted to do it out of Moscow.
And I said well, you know, I’ve been talking to all these people in Leningrad, and they really wanted to it in Leningrad, that’s where the problem is. But he said, you know, it should be Moscow, and blah-blah-blah, you know, the whole central thing. And I was supposed to coordinate with Leningrad. He said, well, there’s no airplane flights there now, they’re all filled up, and i can’t get you a hotel in Leningrad, and I think we should just coordinate from Moscow.
And I did something that I—I don’t know if I would do it today—but I just said I think I can go there myself. So I rented a car, not knowing you’re not supposed to drive outside a certain part, so I just rented the car and I drove to Leningrad, and I met with the people, and they said they could do it. And then I drove back, and I met with Zolotarevsky, and I said you know, I met with the people, and they can do this, and this is what they do, and this is who would host. And he said well, listen, I don’t know anybody who ever drove to Leningrad, so you can do it.
Daniel Satinsky: [Laughs.] How did you rent a car in 1990?
Lizbeth Hasse: I just went to the fancy hotel there and rented a car. And nobody asked me where I was going to take it. I didn’t know I had to tell them I was going to drive out of the Moscow area, and I just —
Daniel Satinsky: You just got a roadmap and followed it?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. And it’s just a straight road, anyway. You know, but I didn’t really know the political, legal restrictions, really, until I met a couple out of the consulate there who said well, we can’t travel anywhere off this particular —
Daniel Satinsky: Right. But they had special rules.
Lizbeth Hasse: Oh, yeah. No, they had special rules —
Daniel Satinsky: And the Soviet diplomats had the same rules in the U.S. There was only restricted areas they could visit. But anyway. So this is still Soviet times, right?
Lizbeth Hasse: This is still Soviet times. And, you know, I mean, things were pretty easy to deal with in Soviet times. I mean, there was the Soviet — there was a mentality that was old-fashioned that you dealt with, the naysaying and stuff, and then there were a lot of people who were just excited to try something new, the younger people, or business people, or some of the bureaucrats, so there were a lot of opportunities and a lot of sense of goodwill. And then I guess… You know, during this time most of my contacts are in the media, film thing. I got a lot of invitations to various republics. I think I’ve been to all of them now except for Turkmenistan.
Daniel Satinsky: Turkmenistan. [Laughs.]
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. And I went there, you know, working on legal projects, civil law projects, talking about intellectual property laws mostly and media stuff.
Daniel Satinsky: And you were being paid by local people, or you were getting USAID money, or how were you doing this?
Lizbeth Hasse: I got USAID — actually, it was pre-USAID. What was that called? You know what it was. Anyway. The incarnation before they put them inside the State Department. I had that money. I had been a Fulbright in ’86 and ’87 in France and had a lot of contacts in the State Department as a result. They’d sent me, actually, way back then to do a lot of work in Francophone Africa.
And I had invitations, mostly invitations from the filmmakers’ unions, and they would pay for just coming.
Daniel Satinsky: Did you ever license any films in that Soviet period?
Lizbeth Hasse: I worked on some…yes, I did. I worked on some contracts for people putting their stuff in…out of Mosfilm* for film festivals and also some television contracts. I still do that, but it’s a different—now it’s for individuals and for production companies, permissions for things and stuff. In fact, I’m working on one right now. So yes. I also…let me see, I was thinking.
Through the media stuff I organized…I’m trying to think of how this happened. Oh, I met a lawyer in Leningrad who was helpful with some of the Heart to Heart stuff and invited me to speak a few times with his faculty, and he was interested in speech issues and communications and things. And we put together, or he asked me to put together and make him my co-director of a conference, a multi-day conference in Novgorod, out of which a lot of independent or trying to be independent film, TV companies came, and smaller TV companies from different regions and republics came to that. We had about close to 200 companies that came to that conference.
And they formed an organization they called the Independent Broadcasting Association, something like that. It doesn’t exist anymore, but they did form that. I brought along with me a producer that I knew from France, and he put together some French professionals, too, because I didn’t want it to be U.S.-Soviet. So we had a German and a Finnish guy, and this group from France, and our American group, and these people from all over the Soviet Union. I think it was a pretty powerful three or four days.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, that’s, I mean, what’s interesting is to see how much activity there was before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The citizen activity was bubbling up, so to speak, right?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. Oh, there was a lot, yeah. Somehow, I think my activity was more intense during that time than afterwards.
Daniel Satinsky: Really? What do you mean?
Lizbeth Hasse: I don’t know. I mean, maybe it was just my own, the course of my own work and stuff, and so many trips, and after a while you’re always in a state of jet lag, and you have to start to be a little more judicious about your time and not go more than once a month and, you know. So that happened.
Daniel Satinsky: And you were going that often a lot because of interest as much as you were making money doing this — you were making some, but this was —
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, I didn’t make a lot of money. I spent money. But there were jobs. I mean, you know, Hal Morgan and his folks paid me, and I got…certainly didn’t…you know, people paid expenses, and then I would get jobs out of stuff, but most of the money came from the American side. And even with the Heart to Heart stuff, which obviously was a nonprofit, that was always funded from the American side. There was not a lot of sense of charitable funding or the notion of it in the Soviet Union, although people gave enormous amounts of time, and cars, and food, and all that, but all the funding was from the American side.
Daniel Satinsky: From the American side, yeah, yeah. But still a lot was going on. There was a lot of contact in that period. Much more than anyone would have thought by the notion of the iron curtain, and…
Lizbeth Hasse: There was enormous, yeah. And then I was asked to, invited by Michael and Dulce Murphy to be on their Track II program. Have you spoken to them?
So, Track II was a great place to meet people, too. Abel Aganbegyan was on the board for a while, and they brought Yeltsin over on his first trip to the United States.
Daniel Satinsky: Is the famous grocery store in Texas the visit?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. And, you know, but those are little flashpoints. But they’ve had steady work. They developed the library for the psychology department at University of Moscow. They’ve had some very steady, long-term projects and relationships. And I did meet people, and I introduced Davlat Khudonazarov to that group, and he joined their advisory board. Oh, I also work with a number of literary people who had publishing issues and publishing deals in the United States, including Viktor Yerofeyev. I don’t know if that name means anything to you. He was a bestselling novelist for a while from there, wrote “Russian Beauty.” And he also joined the advisory part of Track II. And I did meet other literary folks through him. And so that’s been a little business stable, too.
I had a business project for a company in Oakland called Mayer Laboratories. We went to Siberia quite a few times. Mayer Laboratories distributes condoms, and they have their own brand. The brand they developed here was called Kimono. And they had decided that they wanted to try to manufacture condoms, put together a condom manufacturing project in Russia, in Siberia. And we looked at a lot of old, run-down, half built, would-be factory warehouses that were rusting out in various places and had never come to anything, and then ultimately decided it wasn’t going to work in Siberia because you had to import stuff from Malaysia that couldn’t really travel in the weather, and I don’t know, it just… The logistics were too difficult for the manufacturing part. We ended up putting together a company in Ukraine to distribute condoms and to distribute quality condoms. The problem, when we started the condoms in the Soviet Union were very low quality. Basically, they had holes.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, there were lots of jokes about that.
Lizbeth Hasse: And we were supposed to—one of the early things we were supposed to do was we got a donation of a whole lot of condoms from Planned Parenthood in the U.K. to bring to Russia, and I think the Russians — and here I do think it was a nationalistic spirit — they weren’t too happy to get these, their health ministry decided they had to test them, and I don’t know what. The rumor was they fed them to rats, and the rats’ eyes got red, and so we couldn’t distribute the condoms. But I don’t know really what happened. But we weren’t allowed to distribute what were perfectly good, high quality condoms.
Daniel Satinsky: And what year was that?
Lizbeth Hasse: I’m thinking that was ’92 [Subsequent note of correction: 1994].
Daniel Satinsky: So, it was after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you had to cross national borders between Ukraine and Russia.
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. It may have been ’93 [Subsequent note of correction: 1994], and I’d have to check that, too. So, we ended up having an extensive project with the Ministry of Health in Ukraine and Kyiv, and putting together this distribution plant, which operated for some time. I think it did make a little money. It ultimately, I think when it started to make money it was nationalized and Ukrainians took it over, and my client lost his investment. But basically, it was more of a hobby for them. They had some hopes, I think, but it was not, you know, a [tragedy].
Daniel Satinsky: He was the supplier, then yeah, they — But back to the… So, you had been involved with all these Soviet people. Then the Soviet Union collapses. I mean, what were you thinking at that point about the collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union? Were excited, more opportunities, worried? What were you thinking?
Lizbeth Hasse: I don’t think it seemed like an unnatural step. I mean, it seemed like…you know, you have to bear in mind that although I went to a lot of places, and I actually also at one point drove from St. Petersburg to Minsk in a private car by myself, I was mostly in big cities intermingling with people who had an international viewpoint, and this was an exciting time for them, and it didn’t seem like it wasn’t a natural development.
Certainly Aganbeygyan, who was in our midst, took it in stride. Davlat Khudonazarov, who was on the Duma, and then ultimately ran for president of his country, until that terrible time of that, but during the collapse he was very close with Gorbachev. I think there was serious worry, concern as institutions changed quickly, and maybe collapsed, or radically changed, and what does that mean, but there was enough optimism that I think it was more a notion of change than collapse.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, okay. That’s a good point.
Lizbeth Hasse: I have always found the idea that the Soviet Union collapsed is something…as a misnomer.
I mean, I had seen a lot of dysfunctional institutions and empty shells, and when we first started working in the hospitals, we had a syphon draining out of the operating arena into the back of a toilet, and they were reusing suture threads, washing them. And so that, to me, is a state of collapse. That preceded this notion of political collapse.
Daniel Satinsky: The political collapse, yeah.
Lizbeth Hasse: So, no, I think to me it was a development, and there were a lot of things to do. I mean, there was a seriousness and concern about friends and how they were doing, and whether they were safe, but they were a little pooh-poohing about it, too, so… You know, I was interacting with people who were forward-looking in terms of change — filmmakers, media people who were just, you know, running to report on the next exciting event.
I remember one time one of the Estonians I had met had decided to do a journalism degree over here at the J school at Berkeley, and I let him stay at my house for a while while he was looking for a place, and then he decided just to go back because he said, you know, really everything is going on in the Soviet Union and there’s no point in being here. So it was…no, it was more of a time of opportunity. I don’t think I thought of it strictly as business opportunity, particularly. I mean, the business thing had always been risky and unstable, and it didn’t seem to be any better. But it was an expanding universe. That’s what it felt like.
Daniel Satinsky: And how long did it feel like that?
Lizbeth Hasse: That’s a good question. I remember being in Germany and feeling… For quite a while. I guess, you know, I did some work in Moldova. That was…
Daniel Satinsky: So at least through ’93, through the bombing of the Duma?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, definitely.
Daniel Satinsky: And after that?
Lizbeth Hasse: And beyond that, I mean, I was always seeing certain things that were developing and improving, but my trips there were mostly concentrated around the medical.
You know, the business stuff, after the condoms and the continuing business stuff, which for me has been in film and media, that’s been conducted on email and remotely. I haven’t needed to go. I mean, once you get these relationships it’s just like dealing with somebody in L.A., really, at that point.
And the trips were to help with the medical project, and in certain ways those became easier. But I think it had to do with our own sophistication, knowing who to deal with in the various ministry offices and district health departments, and having the familiarity, knowing people and going back to see them again. And the country just started to look better. They had the goodwill time in I don’t remember what year that was, and everything got gussied up in St. Petersburg, and then, you know, people were freely traveling. So, it’s not until the travel started to get more difficult, which is very recent.
Daniel Satinsky: Very recently. Let me go back to Mosfilm. So, you witnessed or at least from afar witnessed the real transformation of the film industry as well. I mean, Mosfilm went through bad times, internal struggles, fights over intellectual property, all kinds of things.
Lizbeth Hasse: Fights over buildings.
Also, one of the folks I work closely with has been the programmer for the Russian film festival, first Soviet Film International Film Festival and now Russian International Film Festival for many, many years. And we watched certain changes there, more internal in terms of who’s in charge, and Putin changing, you know, Putin coming in and changing heads of artistic institutions to the dismay of various people. That, I think, was…those are places where we saw change, but it was less focused towards Americans or whatever. And more about internal power struggle.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. But also, there was a period in which American films sort of dominated the market, both in terms of TV and in cassettes, and movies, and what was it, “Dallas” and contesting with the Mexican soap operas on Russian TV. So, I don’t know if you’ve had any sort of connection with —
Lizbeth Hasse: I was never making deals for Americans over there. I mean, those are established by large, you know, the Warner Brothers and the Disneys. They had their own relationships, and they always had, really.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. But did you see an increasing cultural influence, I guess, for, at least in the beginning, the sort of romance, as I sometimes thought of it, with Americans. You kind of saw that taking place, I assume, right?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. I mean, I think I saw that the whole time. You know, I mean, people knew Voice of America, and they loved to talk about the music they’d heard about from the very first time I met them.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, okay.
Lizbeth Hasse: And they were eager to show that they had knowledge of American culture, those people that I interacted with. And then, you know, there was always a certain amount of cynicism along with it with respect to the interest in American action films and stuff by the filmmakers who had developed taste and repertoire.
Daniel Satinsky: How did they feel about the collapse—I will use the word collapse—of Mosfilm? What did that do to them?
Lizbeth Hasse: People had to get money. You know, I mean, people, what I found was that the difference in the cultural financing, which was that like Europe, the Soviet Union and then Russia, but with maybe less money, but still they funded their filmmakers, they funded their dancers, they funded their theater scriptwriters and everything else. That started to collapse at least…I don’t think it really collapsed that much in the theater area, but it did collapse in the film, and also for writers. They had to find somebody who was going to pay them, or they had to find money to invest in their film productions. And so, there were efforts to put together international film productions and to pre-sell rights in other countries, which they hadn’t had to do before. Or people could come to Russia and count on having everything provided and to make a film and then distribute it throughout the world. But that was no longer the case.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Do you know of any successful films that were co-produced during that period?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, I’m sure I do. Sergei Bodrov. I’d have to go back and kind of see what— [Subsequent note added: Marina Goldovskaya, Andrei Konchalovsky, Georgy Gavrilov.] I was involved in a couple of them.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. And did you continue to be involved with the independent broadcasters in the different countries and regions?
Lizbeth Hasse: Oh, with the broadcasters? Not so much. With filmmakers, but not with people who were actually working the facilities of broadcasting, no.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. Because I know Internews had a lot to do with training of journalists —
Lizbeth Hasse: I did some of that with them. I did some training in East Germany just after the wall came down, during the time of the first independent election, or alternative election, I guess, in East Germany. And yeah, and I went to Moldova and worked on their first, their own national broadcasting agency, where they were looking for somebody to come along and give them some consultation in how to develop criteria for TV licenses, and I did that there. So those were, you know, independent country projects.
Daniel Satinsky: Over time did Russian attorneys develop the expertise to do this kind of international licensing and IP related work?
Lizbeth Hasse: Not so much. You know, I was a member of the Coudert Brothers law firm. Do you know them?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Lizbeth Hasse: And they had an office in St. Petersburg and in Moscow. I was there for a short time. Then they collapsed. [Laughs.] Talking about collapse. They collapsed during the financial crisis. I joined them in like —
Daniel Satinsky: In ’98?
Lizbeth Hasse: No, no, I joined them, I’m talking about later on, in like 2003.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay, they collapsed in 2008.
Lizbeth Hasse: They collapsed — well, they collapsed maybe in ’06, something like that. A slow collapse. I was there for about two and a half years or so, and then it was clear that they were collapsing. But they would bring in Russian lawyers who were promising young folks to join the firm, and they would get trained in IP within those firms. And I think that’s where I would meet young lawyers who had intellectual property, you know, real developed knowledge and were able to use it, were lawyers who joined international firms. I don’t think it grew naturally within Russian law firms.
Daniel Satinsky: Really?
Lizbeth Hasse: I don’t know so much. You know, most of the lawyers I dealt with were in international firms, and the lawyers I dealt with who weren’t had their own small practices, so I’m not sure.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. But the issue of IP in the technology sector has been huge. And the difficulty of ascertaining who actually owns something was like the major stumbling block in the early days, for sure, and I think it’s still been an issue that they’ve been struggling with about IP.
Lizbeth Hasse: I think that’s right. And it certainly was a big problem in the film industry. And the interesting thing about the film industry is you have more of a sense of an author than you do in, say, a patent issue where you’ve got people at an institute developing stuff that basically belongs to the institute, which is how it works here, too. You’ve got a lot of creative people, but they’re at a large pharmaceutical, and they don’t own it. Maybe if they’re working at a university that’s heavily funded, then they get credited and some interest in a project that they’ve developed, but otherwise it’s an institutional ownership issue, and I think that’s really what goes on in Russia now, and probably always did in a way, since the institution was the government, and now it’s still the same.
Daniel Satinsky: I mean, flipping back to the film industry, I had a personal friend who was married to a guy who was an illustrator for children’s films, and he was fairly well-known. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union all of his work was owned by Mosfilm, and I think he managed to get a copy, but never any rights to these animated children’s films that he had made, and he effectively stopped working at that point. And I don’t know how general that experience was.
Lizbeth Hasse: I think it’s probably pretty general. There were people who came to the United States and tried to make their own deals for their films, and then somebody dealing with them, some smaller distributor, would find out this person didn’t even have rights, and these deals just never got anywhere. And if Mosfilm or a distributor in Russia didn’t take an interest, that was the end of it. And coupled with that there wasn’t the support of the filmmaker anymore monetarily or with the institution, so it was a very hard time.
People who could not find a German partner, or work in Europe, or put together an international deal.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. And the people who were able to do that probably had some prior international experience or contacts. In other words, those were fairly domestic —
Lizbeth Hasse: They were people whose films had a reputation. Which is not all that different from your average producer or director in Hollywood, whether you’re brand new and, you know, how you become a hot commodity, it does happen occasionally. But they just didn’t have the networks for that. It was hard. I knew one — well, he was Serbian, I guess — but he was somebody who had sold his film throughout the Soviet bloc, and in Western countries, and suddenly found himself just flailing, just no way knowing how to put together a team, how to make a film. I mean, he had many films that he had made, and he just didn’t know how to do that anymore. It was quite distressing for people. I think the arts really suffered because they had had good support, in the European style, and then that was gone.
Daniel Satinsky: Has it transformed in the sense that now there are sort of private or independent filmmakers and artists that license abroad, or that would use the services of someone like you?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. I mean, there are…I think there’s a lot. I don’t know for sure. I don’t know what the statistics are, and I’m only guessing. I think there’s a lot that the Russian film industry has probably diminished, you know, contracted. They’re still putting out a lot of films, and now they spend a lot of time trying to get money, and those who have relationships do, and people from here seek their money. There’s not that much interest in doing that now. China is the big place to go for your money as far as Americans go, and they’re also seeking that large audience and stuff, and that sort of dictates some of the kinds of films that are made. But yeah, I mean, there’s a much less lively interaction between Russians and Americans in filmmaking right now, and I would say for the last four or five years.
Daniel Satinsky: But connected to politics?
Lizbeth Hasse: Connected to — yes. Connected to the rise of China as the place where—you know, because people making big films, or hoping that they’re making big films want the big audience because that helps to bring the money back in, or that’s where you get the money partners, and so everyone’s interested in —
Daniel Satinsky: In China.
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, as a partner.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Well, so going back to 1996, the Yeltsin election in 1996, which looked to be in peril until he was resuscitated by his domestic and foreign backers, were you —what were you thinking about that election? Were you concerned about what was going to happen to your friends or to the circumstances of the country, or did you have an opinion, or was it background noise and not really that important?
Lizbeth Hasse: No, it wasn’t background noise, and I think I was talking to my friends in St. Petersburg quite a bit about it. They were pretty interested in it at the time. There’s not a lot of political discussion now, and not much… Well, after that people got pretty disconcerted and disaffected, I guess is the word.
Daniel Satinsky: After the Yeltsin election?
Lizbeth Hasse: Well, sometime after the Yeltsin election.
Daniel Satinsky: Disconcerted, but do you know why? Do you have a theory for that?
Lizbeth Hasse: Well, there was a period of general economic improvement, and then… I mean, I’d have to go back and look and see when these things happened. But then there were disappointments, and there were new periods of thought that the economy might collapse again, and so people were starting to think that, you know, there was all that thought about the good old days with the Soviet Union, which probably was not right, but things did start to get economically stressed.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, and 1998, was that like a watershed in any way, or the default and devaluation of the ruble?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, I think that probably was a big deal from the American side. Yeah. I mean, I… I’m trying to think really what was happening with… I mean, I think there was a lot of concern that the country didn’t have a good…there wasn’t a good floor. I know that we were still, you know, within the medical projects, that was a time when we lost some good doctors, too, who left the country. Because along, you know, the anti-Semitism really rose at that time, too. It became more obvious and brutal, and we had a couple of Jewish doctors who left.
Daniel Satinsky: And do you know what kind of anti-Semitism they experienced? Was it their careers being blocked? Was it personal threats? Was it insults? Do you have a recollection?
Lizbeth Hasse: I think it was more about a general… I don’t know of anybody’s career being blocked, but I don’t know if they would have told me that, either. But there certainly was a general feeling and demonstrations of anti-Semitism publicly, and violence in the street, and people concerned about their children.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you know the previous book that I worked on that we wrote was called “Hammer and Silicon,” about the Soviet emigration to the U.S., and people in the high-tech sector in particular. We looked at some of these different periods of emigration. So, I don’t know if you’re interested in that, but…
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, I would be, actually, I mean, and friends going through it, too, so yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: “Hammer and Silicon” is the name of the book.
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, I’ll look for it. Thank you.
Daniel Satinsky: As you were doing this work did you have hopes for what you thought the country would evolve into, what Russia would evolve into? And did those hopes…well, how do you think about those hopes now?
Lizbeth Hasse: You know what, I enjoyed my relationships in Russia and found them quite rich and very satisfying throughout the period of time, and I developed some very good friends early on, and those sustained me. So, you notice less the macro changes when you’re relating at that level. You get concerned about individuals’ jobs, and friends who get thrown out of positions that they had had.
Or my friend who developed the Tarkovsky museum and now lives in a tiny apartment at the outskirts of Moscow because he no longer can run the archives. Putin put in a bureaucrat in his place.
Also, in my work it’s more specific now. There are people who call me when they need something, and they know who to call, and we work on whether they can get permission to use this clip for some documentary that they’re doing in the Ural Mountains or something, I don’t know. I mean, it’s just…they’re much more specific relationships. Also people are not starting up new businesses between Americans and Russians anymore, so on a larger level that impacts me and how I think about the country or respond to it.
I think I always, you know, really, I’m a fairly literary person, and early on I got more and more interested in Russian literature, and trying to learn the language, and getting to know the literary culture. And my husband has put on several theatrical performances in the last few years in St. Petersburg, so we have had ways to relate to the parts that we like of Russia on a continuing basis, both in the medical project which has been extremely effective and developed deep relationships and the artistic side.
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. I mean, I think I saw that the whole time. You know, I mean, people knew Voice of America, and they loved to talk about the music they’d heard about from the very first time I met them.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, okay.
Lizbeth Hasse: And they were eager to show that they had knowledge of American culture, those people that I interacted with. And then, you know, there was always a certain amount of cynicism along with it with respect to the interest in American action films and stuff by the filmmakers who had developed taste and repertoire.
Daniel Satinsky: How did they feel about the collapse—I will use the word collapse—of Mosfilm? What did that do to them?
Lizbeth Hasse: People had to get money. You know, I mean, people, what I found was that the difference in the cultural financing, which was that like Europe, the Soviet Union and then Russia, but with maybe less money, but still they funded their filmmakers, they funded their dancers, they funded their theater scriptwriters and everything else. That started to collapse at least…I don’t think it really collapsed that much in the theater area, but it did collapse in the film, and also for writers. They had to find somebody who was going to pay them, or they had to find money to invest in their film productions. And so, there were efforts to put together international film productions and to pre-sell rights in other countries, which they hadn’t had to do before. Or people could come to Russia and count on having everything provided and to make a film and then distribute it throughout the world. But that was no longer the case.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Do you know of any successful films that were co-produced during that period?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, I’m sure I do. Sergei Bodrov. I’d have to go back and kind of see what— [Subsequent note added: Marina Goldovskaya, Andrei Konchalovsky, Georgy Gavrilov.] I was involved in a couple of them.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. And did you continue to be involved with the independent broadcasters in the different countries and regions?
Lizbeth Hasse: Oh, with the broadcasters? Not so much. With filmmakers, but not with people who were actually working the facilities of broadcasting, no.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. Because I know Internews had a lot to do with training of journalists —
Lizbeth Hasse: I did some of that with them. I did some training in East Germany just after the wall came down, during the time of the first independent election, or alternative election, I guess, in East Germany. And yeah, and I went to Moldova and worked on their first, their own national broadcasting agency, where they were looking for somebody to come along and give them some consultation in how to develop criteria for TV licenses, and I did that there. So those were, you know, independent country projects.
Daniel Satinsky: Over time did Russian attorneys develop the expertise to do this kind of international licensing and IP related work?
Lizbeth Hasse: Not so much. You know, I was a member of the Coudert Brothers law firm. Do you know them?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
Lizbeth Hasse: And they had an office in St. Petersburg and in Moscow. I was there for a short time. Then they collapsed. [Laughs.] Talking about collapse. They collapsed during the financial crisis. I joined them in like —
Daniel Satinsky: In ’98?
Lizbeth Hasse: No, no, I joined them, I’m talking about later on, in like 2003.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, okay, they collapsed in 2008.
Lizbeth Hasse: They collapsed — well, they collapsed maybe in ’06, something like that. A slow collapse. I was there for about two and a half years or so, and then it was clear that they were collapsing. But they would bring in Russian lawyers who were promising young folks to join the firm, and they would get trained in IP within those firms. And I think that’s where I would meet young lawyers who had intellectual property, you know, real developed knowledge and were able to use it, were lawyers who joined international firms. I don’t think it grew naturally within Russian law firms.
Daniel Satinsky: Really?
Lizbeth Hasse: I don’t know so much. You know, most of the lawyers I dealt with were in international firms, and the lawyers I dealt with who weren’t had their own small practices, so I’m not sure.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. But the issue of IP in the technology sector has been huge. And the difficulty of ascertaining who actually owns something was like the major stumbling block in the early days, for sure, and I think it’s still been an issue that they’ve been struggling with about IP.
Lizbeth Hasse: I think that’s right. And it certainly was a big problem in the film industry. And the interesting thing about the film industry is you have more of a sense of an author than you do in, say, a patent issue where you’ve got people at an institute developing stuff that basically belongs to the institute, which is how it works here, too. You’ve got a lot of creative people, but they’re at a large pharmaceutical, and they don’t own it. Maybe if they’re working at a university that’s heavily funded, then they get credited and some interest in a project that they’ve developed, but otherwise it’s an institutional ownership issue, and I think that’s really what goes on in Russia now, and probably always did in a way, since the institution was the government, and now it’s still the same.
Daniel Satinsky: I mean, flipping back to the film industry, I had a personal friend who was married to a guy who was an illustrator for children’s films, and he was fairly well-known. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union all of his work was owned by Mosfilm, and I think he managed to get a copy, but never any rights to these animated children’s films that he had made, and he effectively stopped working at that point. And I don’t know how general that experience was.
Lizbeth Hasse: I think it’s probably pretty general. There were people who came to the United States and tried to make their own deals for their films, and then somebody dealing with them, some smaller distributor, would find out this person didn’t even have rights, and these deals just never got anywhere. And if Mosfilm or a distributor in Russia didn’t take an interest, that was the end of it. And coupled with that there wasn’t the support of the filmmaker anymore monetarily or with the institution, so it was a very hard time.
People who could not find a German partner, or work in Europe, or put together an international deal.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. And the people who were able to do that probably had some prior international experience or contacts. In other words, those were fairly domestic —
Lizbeth Hasse: They were people whose films had a reputation. Which is not all that different from your average producer or director in Hollywood, whether you’re brand new and, you know, how you become a hot commodity, it does happen occasionally. But they just didn’t have the networks for that. It was hard. I knew one — well, he was Serbian, I guess — but he was somebody who had sold his film throughout the Soviet bloc, and in Western countries, and suddenly found himself just flailing, just no way knowing how to put together a team, how to make a film. I mean, he had many films that he had made, and he just didn’t know how to do that anymore. It was quite distressing for people. I think the arts really suffered because they had had good support, in the European style, and then that was gone.
Daniel Satinsky: Has it transformed in the sense that now there are sort of private or independent filmmakers and artists that license abroad, or that would use the services of someone like you?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah. I mean, there are…I think there’s a lot. I don’t know for sure. I don’t know what the statistics are, and I’m only guessing. I think there’s a lot that the Russian film industry has probably diminished, you know, contracted. They’re still putting out a lot of films, and now they spend a lot of time trying to get money, and those who have relationships do, and people from here seek their money. There’s not that much interest in doing that now. China is the big place to go for your money as far as Americans go, and they’re also seeking that large audience and stuff, and that sort of dictates some of the kinds of films that are made. But yeah, I mean, there’s a much less lively interaction between Russians and Americans in filmmaking right now, and I would say for the last four or five years.
Daniel Satinsky: But connected to politics?
Lizbeth Hasse: Connected to — yes. Connected to the rise of China as the place where—you know, because people making big films, or hoping that they’re making big films want the big audience because that helps to bring the money back in, or that’s where you get the money partners, and so everyone’s interested in —
Daniel Satinsky: In China.
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, as a partner.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Well, so going back to 1996, the Yeltsin election in 1996, which looked to be in peril until he was resuscitated by his domestic and foreign backers, were you —what were you thinking about that election? Were you concerned about what was going to happen to your friends or to the circumstances of the country, or did you have an opinion, or was it background noise and not really that important?
Lizbeth Hasse: No, it wasn’t background noise, and I think I was talking to my friends in St. Petersburg quite a bit about it. They were pretty interested in it at the time. There’s not a lot of political discussion now, and not much… Well, after that people got pretty disconcerted and disaffected, I guess is the word.
Daniel Satinsky: After the Yeltsin election?
Lizbeth Hasse: Well, sometime after the Yeltsin election.
Daniel Satinsky: Disconcerted, but do you know why? Do you have a theory for that?
Lizbeth Hasse: Well, there was a period of general economic improvement, and then… I mean, I’d have to go back and look and see when these things happened. But then there were disappointments, and there were new periods of thought that the economy might collapse again, and so people were starting to think that, you know, there was all that thought about the good old days with the Soviet Union, which probably was not right, but things did start to get economically stressed.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, and 1998, was that like a watershed in any way, or the default and devaluation of the ruble?
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, I think that probably was a big deal from the American side. Yeah. I mean, I… I’m trying to think really what was happening with… I mean, I think there was a lot of concern that the country didn’t have a good…there wasn’t a good floor. I know that we were still, you know, within the medical projects, that was a time when we lost some good doctors, too, who left the country. Because along, you know, the anti-Semitism really rose at that time, too. It became more obvious and brutal, and we had a couple of Jewish doctors who left.
Daniel Satinsky: And do you know what kind of anti-Semitism they experienced? Was it their careers being blocked? Was it personal threats? Was it insults? Do you have a recollection?
Lizbeth Hasse: I think it was more about a general… I don’t know of anybody’s career being blocked, but I don’t know if they would have told me that, either. But there certainly was a general feeling and demonstrations of anti-Semitism publicly, and violence in the street, and people concerned about their children.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you know the previous book that I worked on that we wrote was called “Hammer and Silicon,” about the Soviet emigration to the U.S., and people in the high-tech sector in particular. We looked at some of these different periods of emigration. So, I don’t know if you’re interested in that, but…
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, I would be, actually, I mean, and friends going through it, too, so yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: “Hammer and Silicon” is the name of the book.
Lizbeth Hasse: Yeah, I’ll look for it. Thank you.
Daniel Satinsky: As you were doing this work did you have hopes for what you thought the country would evolve into, what Russia would evolve into? And did those hopes…well, how do you think about those hopes now?
Lizbeth Hasse: You know what, I enjoyed my relationships in Russia and found them quite rich and very satisfying throughout the period of time, and I developed some very good friends early on, and those sustained me. So, you notice less the macro changes when you’re relating at that level. You get concerned about individuals’ jobs, and friends who get thrown out of positions that they had had.
Or my friend who developed the Tarkovsky museum and now lives in a tiny apartment at the outskirts of Moscow because he no longer can run the archives. Putin put in a bureaucrat in his place.
Also, in my work it’s more specific now. There are people who call me when they need something, and they know who to call, and we work on whether they can get permission to use this clip for some documentary that they’re doing in the Ural Mountains or something, I don’t know. I mean, it’s just…they’re much more specific relationships. Also people are not starting up new businesses between Americans and Russians anymore, so on a larger level that impacts me and how I think about the country or respond to it.
I think I always, you know, really, I’m a fairly literary person, and early on I got more and more interested in Russian literature, and trying to learn the language, and getting to know the literary culture. And my husband has put on several theatrical performances in the last few years in St. Petersburg, so we have had ways to relate to the parts that we like of Russia on a continuing basis, both in the medical project which has been extremely effective and developed deep relationships and the artistic side.
country house
film studio in Moscow
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