#Media
Internews
Manana Aslamazyan was unfortunately struck by a car in Yerevan and died shortly after being interviewed on December 7, 2021. We include this interview to honor her and the important role she played in independent media in post-Soviet Russia, as will be clear from the interview. She was not a native speaker of English, so this transcript has been slightly edited to put it in readable English. Manana was the principal staff person for Internews, the US NGO promoting independent media in Post-Soviet Russia and other former Soviet Republics. The Archive will include interviews with a number of other key figures in Internews who are referenced in this interview, Liz Hasse, Evelyn Messinger, Kim Spencer, David Hoffman, and Paul Greenberg.
The interview was reviewed by Manana’s colleagues at Internet listed above and by Eric Johnson, one of the early Internews staff who is also mentioned in the interview as a friend. These reviews allowed for correctly identifying the names of people mentioned and, in some cases, correcting minor factual errors that will be included as notes in brackets in the text.
Internews
Manana Aslamazyan was unfortunately struck by a car in Yerevan and died shortly after being interviewed on December 7, 2021. We include this interview to honor her and the important role she played in independent media in post-Soviet Russia, as will be clear from the interview. She was not a native speaker of English, so this transcript has been slightly edited to put it in readable English. Manana was the principal staff person for Internews, the US NGO promoting independent media in Post-Soviet Russia and other former Soviet Republics. The Archive will include interviews with a number of other key figures in Internews who are referenced in this interview, Liz Hasse, Evelyn Messinger, Kim Spencer, David Hoffman, and Paul Greenberg.
The interview was reviewed by Manana’s colleagues at Internet listed above and by Eric Johnson, one of the early Internews staff who is also mentioned in the interview as a friend. These reviews allowed for correctly identifying the names of people mentioned and, in some cases, correcting minor factual errors that will be included as notes in brackets in the text.
Daniel Satinsky Okay, let's start then. I'd like to ask you how you became acquainted with Internews at the beginning and why you decided to work with them.
Manana Aslamazyan Okay, that's very easy. I grew up in Armenia, in Yerevan, in a very intelligent family. My father was theater director. My mother was a math teacher, and it was a very free, flexible family. When I graduated from school and university in Armenia, I got married to a Russian guy. Why it's important. During Soviet times, there was something which called a “propiska*.”
Daniel Satinsky Yes, I know it.
Manana Aslamazyan For citizens of Armenia, it was very difficult to move to Moscow, even if I dreamed about Moscow. In ‘74, I met a Russian guy. We loved each other and he proposed to me. In ‘74 I married this Russian. He was an engineer, and we moved to Moscow. I was absolutely happy. And my husband told this joke: “I don't know why you married me, because of my Moscow propiska, or because you love me in general.”
Because I grew up in an artistic family, I started to work in theater. It was my dream. I had a baby son and stayed at home in ‘74, ‘75, ‘77. And then I found a job in the best Moscow theater in that time. It was really the best. The director who ran this theater was very famous. Even during Soviet times, he came to U.S. and did something in American theater. He was a genius, exactly a genius. And if we were to name the most famous Russian director in the 70s and 80s, it was him. His name is Anatoly Efros. But it's not the story. In the late 80s he died. I used to work as a manager. My responsibility was to organize the travel tickets, all the promotion, all these types of things. I was happy because I sold tickets, closed my office, and went to the stage to see all these plays. It was really interesting. But when he (Efros) died, it was not interesting for me to work for theater anymore, because I didn’t like the new directors and new plays.
Daniel Satinsky What was the name of the theater?
Manana Aslamazyan It was Malaya Bronnaya Theatre.
When Efros died, I thought: where can I go to work? And it so happened that I was offered a job at one of the first Russian NGOs, called “Fond Zashity Glasnosti,” the Glasnost Defense Foundation which was started by Russian cinematographers after the… I don't know what you know about that. When the first anti Soviet demonstrations took place in Latvia and Lithuania, it was the times when journalism did not show the truth. And the Russian cinematographers thought: Okay, we have to push journalists to tell the truth, organize strikes and not work for Soviet television. It was a very romantic idea.
It was a foundation to help those journalists who would like to leave the state-owned media and somehow survive until freedom came. I was working in this foundation as the first director. I registered this foundation. It was one of the first Russian NGOs. I worked there for about a year. Then this Russian Glasnost Defense Foundation together with the democratic deputies… It was ’91, you remember, that's Yeltsin’s time, time of freedom in Russia, blah, blah, blah. We organized the first Russian Forum for Independent Media in the north of Russia in a city called Novgorod, Novgorod Veliky [Editor’s note. The city of Novgorod is also known as Novgorod Veliky in Russian, Novgorod the Great in English. It is not the same as Nizhny Novgorod and should not be confused between the two.].
Daniel Satinsky Yeah, I've been in Novgorod in Soviet times.
Manana Aslamazyan This conference was organized by a member of Saint-Petersburg Council, plus one [American] woman, Liz Hasse, who at that time used to work for Internews in Europe.
Daniel Satinsky Yeah, I spoke with her.
Manana Aslamazyan Liz Hasse came there and helped to organize this meeting. And I, as a Glasnost Defense Foundation director also was there. And then I met Liz for the first time, definitely. For the first time I met Andy Stern, a professor who taught journalism at Berkeley University. He was Liz Hasse’s teacher, and she invited him to come to Novgorod. And since Andy had a lot of miles, frequent flyer’s miles, he also invited his two students: Vince Malgren, and the name of the second one I don't remember. For the first time I met these four Americans, who were in Novgorod Veliky.
These people realized: Oh, there is new media in the Soviet Union, independent media, because we had passed two excellent laws about mass media which give rights to Russian citizens to organize private media.
Daniel Satinsky When was this, in ’92?
Manana Aslamazyan ‘91 or ’90, but that was before the conference.
Daniel Satinsky These were Soviet laws.
Manana Aslamazyan Yeah, Soviet laws about the independent media. Before that we had only government-owned media, and not so many of them. There were three TV channels and something like that. And all the newspapers belonged to the government, everything. But then this new law opened the door. A lot of new media started to grow up, very fast, immediately. And after probably one and half years, in Novgorod [at the conference], we found about 500 TV stations that had been organized and 200 representatives from them were in attendance. It was even still Soviet Union, because, it was November, after the Belovezha Accords. But we still felt that we are one country and there were Ukrainian, Kazakh, Belorussian people from everywhere.
The start of the Internews. People — Liz Hasse, Andy Stern, Vince Malgren. They talked to David [Hoffman], because David Hoffman and Kim Spencer had been many times to Russia, as you know, to the Soviet Union, because of the space bridges. [Note: Space bridges were a series of televised exchanges between Americans and Soviets in the 1980. Further information about this groundbreaking citizen diplomacy initiative is included in interviews with Evelyn Messinger, Kim Spencer, Jim Hickman, Peter Gerwe, and Anya Kucharev.]
Daniel Satinsky Space bridge, yes
Manana Aslamazyan They had a lot of interest in the Soviet Union and felt that the new media could kill the Cold War. And because of all these things, it was very good time. David, Kim, Evelyn Messinger, who used to work as the adviser for the Soros Foundation, Open Society Foundation. Evelyn was Kim’s wife… Have you talked to Evelyn?
Daniel Satinsky Yes.
Manana Aslamazyan All these people were really interested in the Soviet Union Then they realized when Liz Hasse and Andy Stern came back from the Soviet Union [after the Novgorod conference] that there was independent media. This is our time! What can we do? We can teach people how to do private media.
In the meantime, there was USAID. This foundation published their first announcement about grants and said: hey guys, those who want to work with the new Soviet media come to us with your proposal. The first $500,000 was given to Internews by the Soros Foundation. [Note: Eric Johnson was unaware of an initial Soros grant of this size and believes this may be confused with other grants.] A few months after that, USAID gave Internews a big grant. Its title was called “for Independent TV in the former Soviet Union.” Even at that time it was not for only Russia, it was for the former Soviet Union. And Internews started thinking how to organize an office in Moscow.
They hired a few people, Eric Johnson, Vince, Paul Greenberg. You know every one of them; these guys were the first employees. And they needed some local person. As I was one of the organizers of this Novgorod conference, they saw me. They saw that I'm taking care about tickets, about train tickets, about food, lunch, etc. I'm always flying around. They came to David Hoffman, who that time came to Moscow. He went to our Glasnost Defense president, who was Alexei Simonov, he's still president of Glasnost Defense Foundation, and asked him: can you give us Manana to work for Internews? And since at that time in 1991, my husband very unexpectedly had died, and I was alone with my son, who was teenager, 15 years old, in very dangerous time. Alone with a very small salary in Moscow with my son. My husband used to have brothers, etc. But the family was really in Armenia, and I was more or less alone. My salary was really low. And when they talked to Alexei Simonov and said to him: we would like to hire Manana and we're going to offer her a very good salary, $300 dollars. In ’91 $300 dollars was the salary that could help me survive, because I was making about $30 dollars salary, not $300.
I was thinking that I would like to leave the theater. I would like to get a salary to survive, and it was very interesting. I saw Vince and Paul and everyone in Novgorod, I liked those guys, and I would like to go. But Alexei Simonov said no, she has just been working one year, and I think is not good. And they started to joke, and David Hoffman said to Simonov, I’ll gift you a good new Macintosh, a big Macintosh computer. They started to joke who was the best seller or the best buyer, David or Simonov. I started to work with Internews as some sort of administrator, training coordinator, because they at Internews were thinking, we have to organize training, training, training, training.
Daniel Satinsky What was the content of this training? What were they training?
Manana Aslamazyan I will come to that. The context was started with journalism: what is independent news, what is balance for journalism, what are the journalistic ethical standards — these types of seminars. And how to produce: we started to work especially with television. First, three seminars were about how to produce news for TV. And our teacher was Andy Stern, who came again from Berkeley, Bruce Conover, who was the head of the CNN bureau in Moscow at that time and spoke Russian very good, and two other journalists. Thanks to the Soros grant we had, we bought equipment, that was enough for three different groups, who shoot and edit video. [Eric Johnson believes that this was a MacArthur Foundation grant.] With this equipment we travelled: the first seminar was in Kharkiv, Ukraine. The second seminar was in Almaty, [Kazakhstan] and the third seminar was in Oryol, it's a city near Moscow. And after these three seminars, we collected the best students from these three seminars in Moscow. Which means these people for the first time in their lives saw good Hi8 cameras that they could shoot on. They had this Betacam, or the Hi8 editing suite, which is a really big recorder. We carried about a few hundred kilos of equipment from city to city to teach people how to work on real equipment, because… What is the independent TV in ‘91, ‘92, even in ’93? It was two-three young guys, who decided: “OK, we can get the license,” and getting the license was very easy. You just send a letter to get license. Then they even get a credit from a bank, or credit from the rich people, or spend their own money, and they buy a transmitter and two VHS recorders.
Daniel Satinsky Recording deck?
Manana Aslamazyan Even not recording, recorder and transmitter. They were buying a lot of tapes from the private pirate kiosks. Kiosks were selling thrillers, all these American, French, Japanese movies, definitely pirate-like. Russian independent TV grew up with pirated videos. You buy this tape in the kiosk, put to the transmitter and people, sitting in their houses, can watch golden movies; all famous American movies we got by this pirate TV channels. Then more or less smart people recognized that ok, I can't only broadcast movies, people are interested in the local information. It would be very good to produce some sort of local news. But how to produce local news, they had no idea. And it was very, very, very low-quality news. But they realized that for people who are watching that, it’s interesting to know when the main street will be destroyed to pave the new asphalt, or when there will be no hot water in my neighborhood or who will come, etc. This type of hyper local news was very interesting for these people. We came at exactly the good time. We found the TV station owners who would like to start producing their own local news. All the first seminars were about how to produce news. Then, after we've been doing these seminars for a year, we recognized that, guys, it's not only about producing the news, but also about how to manage a private TV company. What is management? What is HR? How to get money? Well, we got the first credit, but we spent all money. How we're going to survive? By the way we knew there is something called advertising!
In the end of ’92 and probably in the beginning of ’93, we put equal effort into seminars about journalism and seminars about TV management, what is management, how to manage a TV station. At that time, we were absolutely lucky, our donor was happy with that. Because right now, when we talk about management, they were saying: oh, these people, we did so many seminars during these 20 years about management. Why do we need to teach spending money, to teach businessmen how to do business? Right now, it's not a very popular topic for a seminar, but in the beginning of 90s, it was really very important. And we invited a teacher for our first practical seminar. In our first seminar there was Meg Gaydosik, after that she started to work for USAID. Her role is absolutely enormous, and I would like you to definitely speak with Meg, because this is exactly about business. Kim Spencer, David Hoffman — they are not about business. They are about expression, about the Cold War, they are about international relationships, but she is about typical business. What is it to do the TV business in former Soviet Union. It’s Meg Gaydosik, who at that time was the COO at TV station in Fairbanks, Alaska. Then she invited the guy, his was name was Robert Campbell. He was from Albuquerque, but I don't know the name of the station he used to run. And then few other people who came and start to invite not the journalist from those TV stations, but their owners. And these people started to teach them how to do the business. And it was very interesting. I remember when this Bob Campbell called me “Hey guys, they are interested in my advertising sheets, my company would like to send us by fax my financial documents!” There were about 30 pages of his financial documents that came by fax from Albuquerque, and he showed them to the guys who live from Tomsk to Vladivostok or somewhere else. It was so interesting. You cannot develop media without developing the business of the media. It's not about only journalism.
After that, during many, many, many years Internews became the center of the education on how to do TV. Year by year, we recognized: TV is not only news or management, TV is also advertising. Hey, we need the advertising department. We need the people who know how to produce advertising. We need to teach people how to find advertisers. We need to learn how to ask them to put money [into advertising]. We have always grown in the topics of our education: Advertising-1, Management-1, Advertising-2... The second one was about how to produce not only news, but some sort of shows or other types of media. We invited the people. They produced probably very interesting stories, but they don't do good-looking design. We started to do seminars about design. Lee Hunt, the American guy who founded the association, now it called Lee Hunt Associates. He was the guy who created this. You remember, CBS has a logo as eye.
Daniel Satinsky: Yes.
Manana Aslamazyan He is the author of this logo. Lee Hunt came to Moscow to teach the designers how to design different logos, etc. Based on his few seminars, we produced the first textbook called “TV Design and Promotion.” We recorded his seminar, then translated it into Russian, and then we produced this book, first in Russian. Then he took this Russian textbook and translated it into English. And we have this probably English textbook in US, “TV design.” Then we started to think okay guys, we teach these people how to do the business. We also taught them, definitely, what is the cost for TV news, what is the cost for entertainment programs, what kinds of entertainment program exist, all these types of things; what is a documentary. And definitely we started to think that piracy is not good. Let's teach these people how not to be pirates but have normal civilized relationships. And we created the project called “Open Skies.” We promised all the broadcasters in all the cities around Russia, these small independent broadcaster around Russia that documentaries are a very interesting genre. And we, as Internews promise to give you one-hour documentaries with “cleared rights,” which means it's not piracy. They have the right to broadcast these documentaries legally.
Daniel Satinsky Okay.
Manana Aslamazyan If you sign the contract with us, we promise you 365 hours of documentaries for one year. About 200 TV stations signed this contract. Then we invited the guy whose name is Grisha (Grigory) Libergal. He is one of the best documentary producers and speaks ten languages. We started to work with him as an interpreter for our seminar, then he became our employee. Then Grisha Libergal, myself and our colleague in the US started to talk with the rights owners and to say to the documentary films owners: “Guys, there is a former Soviet Union, there are 200 TV stations. They are pirates. We would like to help them to become more civilized. Can you sell the rights for the whole Soviet Union? We will translate your documentaries into Russian and distribute to 200 cities.” and they sold to us. They understood our situation. They were interested in becoming civilized and they would like to fight against the piracy. They sold us these documentary works very cheap, one thousand dollars for the whole Soviet Union.
We started to buy and make copies. And remember, there was no Internet. It’s ‘93, ‘94, ‘95. There was no Internet. You can’t send the video via satellites or something like that. It's a tape. We had to make 200 tape copies and send to 200 cities by post or by car or by bus. We became a factory that produces VHS cassettes and sends these cassettes around the Soviet Union. This program, “Open Skies,” was very interesting, and it was also a start of new relations with rights owners. All of this was program was done between ‘92 until ‘98-‘99 when the Internet started to develop.
Another thing we did, we taught journalists how to produce good news stories. We taught him here in Moscow or somewhere in Novgorod, but then he goes back to his Siberia, and we have no idea what kind of news he produces. Is it good or is it not good? And we decided: let's organize something which we called exchange. We decided to produce the program which called “News Local Time.” How it worked. About 50 stations participated at the beginning and then about 200 by the end. For four years. every week they sent us one local news story from their company. Sent to us again on tape. Then we rented a satellite channel from government television. During the nighttime they gave us some time to transmit the stories to Moscow from the local stations. We received all these news stories, we received about 20-50, sometimes 60 stories. Then from these 60 stories we produced a news program. These were the 10-12 best stories from different stations. We edited it and sent back to the local stations. If I participated in this “News Local Time” program I would send one story a week [of local news] and then I would get back a one half-hour program of very good quality, news from all over the Soviet Union to broadcast from my station.
Daniel Satinsky Again, by a videotape. You receive a tape...
Manana Aslamazyan The first year. And then when we rented this transmitter equipment from the Soviet Union, we just transmitted by satellite and they received and broadcast, received and broadcast.
Manana Aslamazyan Okay, that's very easy. I grew up in Armenia, in Yerevan, in a very intelligent family. My father was theater director. My mother was a math teacher, and it was a very free, flexible family. When I graduated from school and university in Armenia, I got married to a Russian guy. Why it's important. During Soviet times, there was something which called a “propiska*.”
Daniel Satinsky Yes, I know it.
Manana Aslamazyan For citizens of Armenia, it was very difficult to move to Moscow, even if I dreamed about Moscow. In ‘74, I met a Russian guy. We loved each other and he proposed to me. In ‘74 I married this Russian. He was an engineer, and we moved to Moscow. I was absolutely happy. And my husband told this joke: “I don't know why you married me, because of my Moscow propiska, or because you love me in general.”
Because I grew up in an artistic family, I started to work in theater. It was my dream. I had a baby son and stayed at home in ‘74, ‘75, ‘77. And then I found a job in the best Moscow theater in that time. It was really the best. The director who ran this theater was very famous. Even during Soviet times, he came to U.S. and did something in American theater. He was a genius, exactly a genius. And if we were to name the most famous Russian director in the 70s and 80s, it was him. His name is Anatoly Efros. But it's not the story. In the late 80s he died. I used to work as a manager. My responsibility was to organize the travel tickets, all the promotion, all these types of things. I was happy because I sold tickets, closed my office, and went to the stage to see all these plays. It was really interesting. But when he (Efros) died, it was not interesting for me to work for theater anymore, because I didn’t like the new directors and new plays.
Daniel Satinsky What was the name of the theater?
Manana Aslamazyan It was Malaya Bronnaya Theatre.
When Efros died, I thought: where can I go to work? And it so happened that I was offered a job at one of the first Russian NGOs, called “Fond Zashity Glasnosti,” the Glasnost Defense Foundation which was started by Russian cinematographers after the… I don't know what you know about that. When the first anti Soviet demonstrations took place in Latvia and Lithuania, it was the times when journalism did not show the truth. And the Russian cinematographers thought: Okay, we have to push journalists to tell the truth, organize strikes and not work for Soviet television. It was a very romantic idea.
It was a foundation to help those journalists who would like to leave the state-owned media and somehow survive until freedom came. I was working in this foundation as the first director. I registered this foundation. It was one of the first Russian NGOs. I worked there for about a year. Then this Russian Glasnost Defense Foundation together with the democratic deputies… It was ’91, you remember, that's Yeltsin’s time, time of freedom in Russia, blah, blah, blah. We organized the first Russian Forum for Independent Media in the north of Russia in a city called Novgorod, Novgorod Veliky [Editor’s note. The city of Novgorod is also known as Novgorod Veliky in Russian, Novgorod the Great in English. It is not the same as Nizhny Novgorod and should not be confused between the two.].
Daniel Satinsky Yeah, I've been in Novgorod in Soviet times.
Manana Aslamazyan This conference was organized by a member of Saint-Petersburg Council, plus one [American] woman, Liz Hasse, who at that time used to work for Internews in Europe.
Daniel Satinsky Yeah, I spoke with her.
Manana Aslamazyan Liz Hasse came there and helped to organize this meeting. And I, as a Glasnost Defense Foundation director also was there. And then I met Liz for the first time, definitely. For the first time I met Andy Stern, a professor who taught journalism at Berkeley University. He was Liz Hasse’s teacher, and she invited him to come to Novgorod. And since Andy had a lot of miles, frequent flyer’s miles, he also invited his two students: Vince Malgren, and the name of the second one I don't remember. For the first time I met these four Americans, who were in Novgorod Veliky.
These people realized: Oh, there is new media in the Soviet Union, independent media, because we had passed two excellent laws about mass media which give rights to Russian citizens to organize private media.
Daniel Satinsky When was this, in ’92?
Manana Aslamazyan ‘91 or ’90, but that was before the conference.
Daniel Satinsky These were Soviet laws.
Manana Aslamazyan Yeah, Soviet laws about the independent media. Before that we had only government-owned media, and not so many of them. There were three TV channels and something like that. And all the newspapers belonged to the government, everything. But then this new law opened the door. A lot of new media started to grow up, very fast, immediately. And after probably one and half years, in Novgorod [at the conference], we found about 500 TV stations that had been organized and 200 representatives from them were in attendance. It was even still Soviet Union, because, it was November, after the Belovezha Accords. But we still felt that we are one country and there were Ukrainian, Kazakh, Belorussian people from everywhere.
The start of the Internews. People — Liz Hasse, Andy Stern, Vince Malgren. They talked to David [Hoffman], because David Hoffman and Kim Spencer had been many times to Russia, as you know, to the Soviet Union, because of the space bridges. [Note: Space bridges were a series of televised exchanges between Americans and Soviets in the 1980. Further information about this groundbreaking citizen diplomacy initiative is included in interviews with Evelyn Messinger, Kim Spencer, Jim Hickman, Peter Gerwe, and Anya Kucharev.]
Daniel Satinsky Space bridge, yes
Manana Aslamazyan They had a lot of interest in the Soviet Union and felt that the new media could kill the Cold War. And because of all these things, it was very good time. David, Kim, Evelyn Messinger, who used to work as the adviser for the Soros Foundation, Open Society Foundation. Evelyn was Kim’s wife… Have you talked to Evelyn?
Daniel Satinsky Yes.
Manana Aslamazyan All these people were really interested in the Soviet Union Then they realized when Liz Hasse and Andy Stern came back from the Soviet Union [after the Novgorod conference] that there was independent media. This is our time! What can we do? We can teach people how to do private media.
In the meantime, there was USAID. This foundation published their first announcement about grants and said: hey guys, those who want to work with the new Soviet media come to us with your proposal. The first $500,000 was given to Internews by the Soros Foundation. [Note: Eric Johnson was unaware of an initial Soros grant of this size and believes this may be confused with other grants.] A few months after that, USAID gave Internews a big grant. Its title was called “for Independent TV in the former Soviet Union.” Even at that time it was not for only Russia, it was for the former Soviet Union. And Internews started thinking how to organize an office in Moscow.
They hired a few people, Eric Johnson, Vince, Paul Greenberg. You know every one of them; these guys were the first employees. And they needed some local person. As I was one of the organizers of this Novgorod conference, they saw me. They saw that I'm taking care about tickets, about train tickets, about food, lunch, etc. I'm always flying around. They came to David Hoffman, who that time came to Moscow. He went to our Glasnost Defense president, who was Alexei Simonov, he's still president of Glasnost Defense Foundation, and asked him: can you give us Manana to work for Internews? And since at that time in 1991, my husband very unexpectedly had died, and I was alone with my son, who was teenager, 15 years old, in very dangerous time. Alone with a very small salary in Moscow with my son. My husband used to have brothers, etc. But the family was really in Armenia, and I was more or less alone. My salary was really low. And when they talked to Alexei Simonov and said to him: we would like to hire Manana and we're going to offer her a very good salary, $300 dollars. In ’91 $300 dollars was the salary that could help me survive, because I was making about $30 dollars salary, not $300.
I was thinking that I would like to leave the theater. I would like to get a salary to survive, and it was very interesting. I saw Vince and Paul and everyone in Novgorod, I liked those guys, and I would like to go. But Alexei Simonov said no, she has just been working one year, and I think is not good. And they started to joke, and David Hoffman said to Simonov, I’ll gift you a good new Macintosh, a big Macintosh computer. They started to joke who was the best seller or the best buyer, David or Simonov. I started to work with Internews as some sort of administrator, training coordinator, because they at Internews were thinking, we have to organize training, training, training, training.
Daniel Satinsky What was the content of this training? What were they training?
Manana Aslamazyan I will come to that. The context was started with journalism: what is independent news, what is balance for journalism, what are the journalistic ethical standards — these types of seminars. And how to produce: we started to work especially with television. First, three seminars were about how to produce news for TV. And our teacher was Andy Stern, who came again from Berkeley, Bruce Conover, who was the head of the CNN bureau in Moscow at that time and spoke Russian very good, and two other journalists. Thanks to the Soros grant we had, we bought equipment, that was enough for three different groups, who shoot and edit video. [Eric Johnson believes that this was a MacArthur Foundation grant.] With this equipment we travelled: the first seminar was in Kharkiv, Ukraine. The second seminar was in Almaty, [Kazakhstan] and the third seminar was in Oryol, it's a city near Moscow. And after these three seminars, we collected the best students from these three seminars in Moscow. Which means these people for the first time in their lives saw good Hi8 cameras that they could shoot on. They had this Betacam, or the Hi8 editing suite, which is a really big recorder. We carried about a few hundred kilos of equipment from city to city to teach people how to work on real equipment, because… What is the independent TV in ‘91, ‘92, even in ’93? It was two-three young guys, who decided: “OK, we can get the license,” and getting the license was very easy. You just send a letter to get license. Then they even get a credit from a bank, or credit from the rich people, or spend their own money, and they buy a transmitter and two VHS recorders.
Daniel Satinsky Recording deck?
Manana Aslamazyan Even not recording, recorder and transmitter. They were buying a lot of tapes from the private pirate kiosks. Kiosks were selling thrillers, all these American, French, Japanese movies, definitely pirate-like. Russian independent TV grew up with pirated videos. You buy this tape in the kiosk, put to the transmitter and people, sitting in their houses, can watch golden movies; all famous American movies we got by this pirate TV channels. Then more or less smart people recognized that ok, I can't only broadcast movies, people are interested in the local information. It would be very good to produce some sort of local news. But how to produce local news, they had no idea. And it was very, very, very low-quality news. But they realized that for people who are watching that, it’s interesting to know when the main street will be destroyed to pave the new asphalt, or when there will be no hot water in my neighborhood or who will come, etc. This type of hyper local news was very interesting for these people. We came at exactly the good time. We found the TV station owners who would like to start producing their own local news. All the first seminars were about how to produce news. Then, after we've been doing these seminars for a year, we recognized that, guys, it's not only about producing the news, but also about how to manage a private TV company. What is management? What is HR? How to get money? Well, we got the first credit, but we spent all money. How we're going to survive? By the way we knew there is something called advertising!
In the end of ’92 and probably in the beginning of ’93, we put equal effort into seminars about journalism and seminars about TV management, what is management, how to manage a TV station. At that time, we were absolutely lucky, our donor was happy with that. Because right now, when we talk about management, they were saying: oh, these people, we did so many seminars during these 20 years about management. Why do we need to teach spending money, to teach businessmen how to do business? Right now, it's not a very popular topic for a seminar, but in the beginning of 90s, it was really very important. And we invited a teacher for our first practical seminar. In our first seminar there was Meg Gaydosik, after that she started to work for USAID. Her role is absolutely enormous, and I would like you to definitely speak with Meg, because this is exactly about business. Kim Spencer, David Hoffman — they are not about business. They are about expression, about the Cold War, they are about international relationships, but she is about typical business. What is it to do the TV business in former Soviet Union. It’s Meg Gaydosik, who at that time was the COO at TV station in Fairbanks, Alaska. Then she invited the guy, his was name was Robert Campbell. He was from Albuquerque, but I don't know the name of the station he used to run. And then few other people who came and start to invite not the journalist from those TV stations, but their owners. And these people started to teach them how to do the business. And it was very interesting. I remember when this Bob Campbell called me “Hey guys, they are interested in my advertising sheets, my company would like to send us by fax my financial documents!” There were about 30 pages of his financial documents that came by fax from Albuquerque, and he showed them to the guys who live from Tomsk to Vladivostok or somewhere else. It was so interesting. You cannot develop media without developing the business of the media. It's not about only journalism.
After that, during many, many, many years Internews became the center of the education on how to do TV. Year by year, we recognized: TV is not only news or management, TV is also advertising. Hey, we need the advertising department. We need the people who know how to produce advertising. We need to teach people how to find advertisers. We need to learn how to ask them to put money [into advertising]. We have always grown in the topics of our education: Advertising-1, Management-1, Advertising-2... The second one was about how to produce not only news, but some sort of shows or other types of media. We invited the people. They produced probably very interesting stories, but they don't do good-looking design. We started to do seminars about design. Lee Hunt, the American guy who founded the association, now it called Lee Hunt Associates. He was the guy who created this. You remember, CBS has a logo as eye.
Daniel Satinsky: Yes.
Manana Aslamazyan He is the author of this logo. Lee Hunt came to Moscow to teach the designers how to design different logos, etc. Based on his few seminars, we produced the first textbook called “TV Design and Promotion.” We recorded his seminar, then translated it into Russian, and then we produced this book, first in Russian. Then he took this Russian textbook and translated it into English. And we have this probably English textbook in US, “TV design.” Then we started to think okay guys, we teach these people how to do the business. We also taught them, definitely, what is the cost for TV news, what is the cost for entertainment programs, what kinds of entertainment program exist, all these types of things; what is a documentary. And definitely we started to think that piracy is not good. Let's teach these people how not to be pirates but have normal civilized relationships. And we created the project called “Open Skies.” We promised all the broadcasters in all the cities around Russia, these small independent broadcaster around Russia that documentaries are a very interesting genre. And we, as Internews promise to give you one-hour documentaries with “cleared rights,” which means it's not piracy. They have the right to broadcast these documentaries legally.
Daniel Satinsky Okay.
Manana Aslamazyan If you sign the contract with us, we promise you 365 hours of documentaries for one year. About 200 TV stations signed this contract. Then we invited the guy whose name is Grisha (Grigory) Libergal. He is one of the best documentary producers and speaks ten languages. We started to work with him as an interpreter for our seminar, then he became our employee. Then Grisha Libergal, myself and our colleague in the US started to talk with the rights owners and to say to the documentary films owners: “Guys, there is a former Soviet Union, there are 200 TV stations. They are pirates. We would like to help them to become more civilized. Can you sell the rights for the whole Soviet Union? We will translate your documentaries into Russian and distribute to 200 cities.” and they sold to us. They understood our situation. They were interested in becoming civilized and they would like to fight against the piracy. They sold us these documentary works very cheap, one thousand dollars for the whole Soviet Union.
We started to buy and make copies. And remember, there was no Internet. It’s ‘93, ‘94, ‘95. There was no Internet. You can’t send the video via satellites or something like that. It's a tape. We had to make 200 tape copies and send to 200 cities by post or by car or by bus. We became a factory that produces VHS cassettes and sends these cassettes around the Soviet Union. This program, “Open Skies,” was very interesting, and it was also a start of new relations with rights owners. All of this was program was done between ‘92 until ‘98-‘99 when the Internet started to develop.
Another thing we did, we taught journalists how to produce good news stories. We taught him here in Moscow or somewhere in Novgorod, but then he goes back to his Siberia, and we have no idea what kind of news he produces. Is it good or is it not good? And we decided: let's organize something which we called exchange. We decided to produce the program which called “News Local Time.” How it worked. About 50 stations participated at the beginning and then about 200 by the end. For four years. every week they sent us one local news story from their company. Sent to us again on tape. Then we rented a satellite channel from government television. During the nighttime they gave us some time to transmit the stories to Moscow from the local stations. We received all these news stories, we received about 20-50, sometimes 60 stories. Then from these 60 stories we produced a news program. These were the 10-12 best stories from different stations. We edited it and sent back to the local stations. If I participated in this “News Local Time” program I would send one story a week [of local news] and then I would get back a one half-hour program of very good quality, news from all over the Soviet Union to broadcast from my station.
Daniel Satinsky Again, by a videotape. You receive a tape...
Manana Aslamazyan The first year. And then when we rented this transmitter equipment from the Soviet Union, we just transmitted by satellite and they received and broadcast, received and broadcast.
Daniel Satinsky Oh, OK.
Manana Aslamazyan Another step to develop this media business. But it’s not only that. In these years we also recognized: when I am the owner of a TV channel and I’m going to do advertising for my local drugstore or my local bakery, I can ask them for a hundred rubles and put this address of this bakery on my TV screen. But it's not enough to make real money. I would like to get to big budgets and big budgets exist only in Moscow. In my city, there are not too many big budget advertisers who are ready to pay a lot of money. Then they decide: if I am the owner of a TV station, even in Yekaterinburg, which is the third biggest city in Russia, the number of my viewers is not enough to be attractive for big business. It would be interesting to try to organize somehow a TV station union. At that time, we already used to organize the heads of advertising departments of Russian TV channels association. Let's say I am the head of advertising department in Yekaterinburg, another one is the head of the advertising department in Novgorod, in Oryol etc. All of them together came to our seminars and is some sort of way exchanged information how to work with advertisers. And they think: if we come together to the big advertisers, probably we can get a lot of money. For that reason, after one of the seminars about management, a few TV managers decided: let's think how we can organize some sort of TV network. What is a TV network? Network is something which exists in the U.S.: CBS, NBC, etc. And how does it work? There is the independent station in each American city, but they have special programs, which belong to the network. CBS produces The Oprah Winfrey Show. Someone creates the Oprah Winfrey show and sells it to CBS. And the broadcast the Oprah Winfrey Show. Each independent, more or less independent channel in U.S.: channel in Boston, channel in San Francisco, they broadcast this Oprah Winfrey Show. They do not produce that show. They just broadcast it because they are members of CBS network. Our guys decided: let’s organize our network. And they organized network, called Independent Broadcasting System.
Daniel Satinsky Great.
Manana Aslamazyan They signed an agreement among themselves. And the agreement says: we're going to buy rights for everyone to broadcast for four hours, and we promise to broadcast in these four hours. It can be a feature films, documentaries, some sort of programs. We’re going to broadcast the same TV shows, the same movies, the same documentaries, the same everything every day. And then we come to an advertiser in Moscow and say: we have 60 cities that every day show the best American documentary at 8 p.m. local time. We would like to offer you this audience. Will you buy our viewers? And we organized this independent network. Meg Gaydosik and Bob Campbell and other very famous people who ran media in U.S. and even came to Russia and lived there for about a year, half year, etc. They helped us to create this independent TV network, and this network also hired two young Americans: Paul Mitcher and another guy, [Mitchell] Rosenbaum. I don't remember. They became our sellers for this independent network. They went to Russian advertisers, they went to Coca-Cola, they went to the lot of-
Daniel Satinsky Mars and Proctor and Gamble…
Manana Aslamazyan …McDonalds. You can show your advertising not only on the federal TV channels, but also on local channels. It's much better because there is a very good trust in local channels and this is very good. We can advertise not Coca-Cola in general, but we also can advertise those who sell Coca-Cola in this city. Put the local number there. It was very smart idea. And this Independent Broadcasting System, that's what it was called. Independent Broadcasting System, they organized about 60 big channels in it.
Daniel Satinsky This was in 50 cities? 60. And was the content mostly American? What was the content?
Manana Aslamazyan Content was American, French, Russian. There were a lot of different… But the movies are definitely the most attractive thing. And we bought a few TV series from the Brazil, soap operas. The soap opera was very popular. It was very cheap; it was easy to broadcast. There were about 200 episodes, and it lasted a long time. We bought it for $100 per hour, and it was for all this independent system. It was really cheap, and it was really great.
Manana Aslamazyan Last two things which I would like to tell you about these years. At the end of 90’, there few other things started to grow in Soviet Russia at that time.
Manana Aslamazyan Anyway, what was going on in the meantime. In the meantime, there was... What's the name of the head of CNN?
Daniel Satinsky Ted Turner.
Manana Aslamazyan Yes. Ted Turner. He's also become interested in Russia and wanted to come to Russia to do business. And he organized one of the first… Probably at the same time, 93’, I don't remember exactly. With Eduard Sagalaev, who is the one of the very famous Russian producers and rich guy, they organized this TV-6 channel which was an American channel. They got a license, and TV-6 was one the first real businesses in Russia. TV-6 also tried to get the license for different cities and organize these things and something like that. Which mean this IBS, Independent Broadcasting System grew up in competition with TV-6, with a channel that belonged to Ted Turner. You can read a little bit about it. Ted Turner had a lot of interviews about that, and you don't need me to tell the story. That's the first thing. The second is that there was not only Ted Turner, we used to have lot of good American teaching. And a lot of rich guys in the Soviet Union decided “I also would like to open a TV station in Moscow.” They started to open independent TV stations, privately owned independent TV stations in Moscow. They put in a lot of money and got broadcast licenses for Moscow. But very soon they recognized that they can make good money from the Moscow-based advertisers, because they have the broadcast for Moscow. But they don't have the whole Soviet Union. They would like to cover all Russia, let's say the Russia first. And they started to think how to do that. They recognized that there are a lot of local TV stations in these cities. At that time, about 1998, we used to have a catalog of these TV stations, and we had very good Internet resource. And we used to have about 2,500 TV stations in our catalog.
It was even more, because if we count also newspapers, all independent media probably there were about 15,000. But for only TV stations, which used to be in our catalog, there were 2,500. I can show you. We even published a book about that. And these people from Moscow thought that it's very interesting. “Probably I can get an agreement with some local station.” And they tried to hunt these local stations. In the meantime, there was one of these Russian-based broadcasters called REN-TV. And it was organized by a very independent woman, very brave, very, very, very smart. She sold her apartments to organize the TV channel. Really, sold her apartment. She had a very good experience in producing programs in the former Soviet Union. She produced one of the best TV programs called Kinopanorama, it was a show about cinema. She knew a lot of people, everybody knew her. She was very famous. She was very brave and very independent. And she sold her excellent apartment. And her husband used to be a former dissident, Maksimov, who left Russia many, many years ago.
Daniel Satinsky What was her name?
Manana Aslamazyan Irena Lesnevskaya. She organized this REN-TV because her name is “Irena.” She broadcasted only in Moscow. And because I knew her personally and I loved her and I trusted her, I came up with an idea. I talked to this IBS guy. I told them, guys, you have licenses in 60 cities. She has license in Moscow. It would be very good if we can make a deal and create a real network of the channels with the broadcasting licenses in Moscow and in many, many cities. I talked to the Board of this IBS and called Irena and said: Irena Stefanovna, I would like to bring you five guys who have a license in the biggest Russian cities: Nizhniy Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, St Petersburg and Tomsk. And we would like to talk with you. And she said, please come!
We came to her and immediately they decided to make a deal and to create Ren-TV – NVS (IBS) and they started to work. There were a lot of details, I don't want to go too deep into. If you would like me to tell about this story, we can maybe talk another time. We created this REN-TV - NVS story. And not only REN-TV, at that time we organized something called TNT in Moscow, one channel from Moscow CTC, which is privately owned right now. They even went IPO in US, CTC channel. You know it?
Daniel Satinsky Yeah. There was a guy…
Manana Aslamazyan Alexander Rodnyansky.
Daniel Satinsky Okay.
Manana Aslamazyan They really went IPO. Mikhail Khodorkovsky started to buy some the TV channels...
Daniel Satinsky These years Gusinsky also had his...
Manana Aslamazyan Oh, Gusinsky! I forgot, the biggest one was NTV, the biggest one was Gusinsky and NTV. And I would like to tell you, when Gusinsky started to make NTV first things what they did. It was probably in 93”. [He hired] One day the NTV editor in chief Oleg Dobrodeev, who is now running the government TV called Russia-RTR, this is big transformation happened to this guy. The second guy was Yevgeny Kiselyov, a journalist who right now lives in Kyiv. It’s not Dmitry Kiselyov. There are two Kiselyovs: Yevgeny (“Eugene”) Kiselyov and Dmitry. Yevgeny Kiselyov is persona non grata in Russia and he lives in Ukraine. and he is doing his Sunday show. [He hired] Yevgeny Kiselyov and Igor Malashenko, who was a chief executive director of this Gusinsky’s channel. Gusinsky was the owner. He hired these three best guys at that time to make his TV channel. They called me and came to our office, to Internews. I was shocked. They were stars! Why they came to me? We were doing renovation in the office, we just moved to this office. There was a small room full of people and these three big guys came, all about two meters tall, and famous and everyone know them. And they came to my office and said: ‘We know you are Americans, working with Americans. We are looking for the journalists around the city. Can you help us to find good journalists in different cities, to create our network of journalists?” They didn't want to create network or broadcasters; they would like to create a network of journalists. I gave them a lot of addresses, and we worked with NTV very closely. Until Gusinsky sold NTV and NTV became a horrible channel, we were very friendly, really close with NTV, a lot of NTV journalists taught at our seminars, all the stars. There was NTV “before” and “after”. NTV “before” was an excellent channel, independent TV channel, but a little bit maybe too politicized and became… I think right now about CNN. In the beginning CNN was totally balanced media. Every word was truth, we knew it’s the truth. When Trump, Trumpism came, all this type of things came, sometimes we see, the CNN is against [Trump], they don’t keep the balance. Because they became an opinionated journalism.
And this also happened in the Soviet Union [Russia]. Sometimes NTV became too opinionated because they would like to support Yeltsin's people against some communists, something like that. They lost the independence. They lost the balance and found themselves in a dangerous situation. About many media organizations today which started in early 90s, when we talk about it among us, we always add a few words: “Gazeta.ru before or Gazeta.ru after.” Its name is still Gazeta.ru, but two different media. NTV before – it was excellent, and the NTV after… I don't have button for this channel on my remote. I mean NTV doesn't exist for me at all. REN-TV, which I helped to create and grow and make excellent doesn't exist for me anymore. It became horrible, horrible, horrible. All these things at the end of 90s and beginning of 2000s I would say, somehow there was a boundary line. For different media in different years, but it's probably end of 90s and beginning of 2000s, sometime 2003-2005. It depends on how long the owner could keep his independence.
It happened to the big media, it happened to the small media, private media, local media, the regional media, all these things happened during these 2000s. These TV channels owned by Gusinsky, Berezovsky, Lesnevskaya started to buy local media, started to pay them money. [They were actually buying] license: one license two licenses. And by the end of 2002, maybe 2003, we used to have for example four big networks: TV-6, NTV, REN-TV, TNT, CTC – five big networks, who either had agreements with the local broadcasters or owned local media as a business unit. Even at that time they were more or less independent. We used to organize the Russian American Media Entrepreneurship Dialogue in 2002. It was initiated by USAID. I would like to send you materials about this Dialogue, Unfortunately I only have printed materials because when Internews closed in Russia, they took everything. I don’t have an archive on my computer, but I can scan this material and show you this Russian American Media Entrepreneurship Dialog which happened din the US, including US media and businessmen. It started probably at the same time as the Russian American business dialogue. It was 2002, 2003. I don't know if you have some connection with that.
Daniel Satinsky I remember that period, so yeah.
Manana Aslamazyan There was supposed to be a meeting with the two presidents.
Daniel Satinsky Gore–Chernomyrdin Commission.
Manana Aslamazyan And before that they organized these dialogs. Internews was one of the organizers for the media entrepreneurship dialog. At that time, we used to have really independent media. Even the Minister of Mass Media, Mikhail Lesin, who was killed in Washington many years ago, probably, you know this story. At that time, when we were organizing the conference, he said: “Government must leave the media. Media have to be private. Media must be independent,” They promised a lot of interesting things. But starting from 2004, 2005, the government and the oligarchs who were controlled by and were very close to government, started to buy everything. Right now, we don't have independent TV on the federal, regional level at all. We have independent media, I would say online media, a lot of online media, very small, very poor, but online media. One independent TV channel which broadcasts is the TV station “Rain,” which is right now in a difficult situation. And we still have probably a few locally owned TV channels which definitely are very weak and for them it’s very difficult to survive. Most of the owners, who became too rich, sold their businesses to rich people and bought villas on the Cote d'Azur or somewhere else. Most of them have left the country, live in U.S, in Europe, because they sold so well the TV stations. They live without working, as rentier for the end of their life, even aren’t starting to do new business. Because it's very difficult when you have the hundreds of millions on your account and you moved from your country to another, it's very difficult to start a new business. As one of them told me, “I didn't go to school with these people. I didn't go to university. They are not my friends. I don't understand them. It's better to put the money in an investment fund and live off the interest. I'm not taking the risk to do the new business in foreign country.” Most of them are doing that.
That's the story about the end of independent television in Russia. My personal story was totally different. And I don't know if you're interested in that, but independent… Oh, two things I would like to say, why do they always say, “Ask Manana, ask Manana!”
Until ‘94, we had this Internews representative office in Moscow. I used to have an American director, Vince Malgren. I used to have training coordinator Paul Greenberg. I used to have the program manager Meg Gaydosik. I used to have a lot of Americans who worked there. I also worked as an administrator, as an executive, some sort of executive. But what is very good about Russians, I don't know how you feel about that, but we learn very fast.
Daniel Satinsky Yes.
Manana Aslamazyan All of us would like to take care about our business. In ’94 Vince decided to leave the country after the three years in Moscow. He said, “I would like to go back. To be honest, I feel very sorry. My salary is ten times more than yours, but you work ten times more than me, and I feel sorry about that. I would like to recommend that you as a director.” My salary was about 1,000 or 500, I don't remember.
I said, “Oh, Vince, I can’t, I'm not working for Internews. I have just a temporary contract as a CEO. But you know what I would like? I would like to organize our Russian Internews as a Russian organization, not as a representative office.” And we started to discuss these things. Vince moved back, and we discussed it with David and with everyone. And in ’97 15 Russian citizens plus the Persephone Miel, who used to work for Internews Network, but lived in Russia, we set up the new organization called Internews Russia. We closed out the representative office. We registered the Russian-owned organization and called it “Internews Russia.” It's exactly the name. I became president of this organization and started to work. When the Internews Network, the US-based organization, got the grants, they took it from USAID, took part of this money for their own employees and sent the grant to us. But we started to have opportunity to apply not only to USAID but not only to US-based donors. We started to do fundraising from European organizations, from Russian foundations. We got money from the MacArthur Foundation. We got money from Ford Foundation. We got money from the European Endowment for Democracy, from the European Union, TACIS Program. There're lot of European donors based there. In the beginning of 2000s, we used to be the richest, biggest Russian NGO, who were run by a Russian citizen. We had a good relationship with the European donors, with European partners, because we kept the name of Internews. I used to be a member of the Internews Network Board, and every year I went to the Board Meeting. I was always joking: “I am an Armenian woman, who lives in Russia. I am excellent candidate as a board member, because of my gender, nationality.
Daniel Satinsky Perfect.
Manana Aslamazyan For many years I used to be a Board member for Internews Network and Internews Europe. Anyway, we organized this Internews Russia, called Internews, autonomous non-profit organization. We had a very good board. We had Americans in our board, we had Russian people on our board, definitely. And donors from all around the world, and donors even from the Russian oligarchs. Mikhail Khodorkovsky gave us the first grant, $1 million. There was an excellent oligarch whose name is Dmitry Zimin, he gave us grant. Anyway, the Russian oligarchs also gave us money, sometimes even the TV stations we helped grow. They gave us small amounts of money, but they gave as a thank you for everything we taught them. We became the biggest Russian NGO with the budget about $5 or $7 millions per year, about 65 full time employees. There were 100-200 part time employees. We were in charge of everything, everything, everything what was going on in Russia about media. I remember that the government at that time tried to put the licensing process into order. They even invited me as one of the three independent members in this license committee, and I participated. Every month we give a lot of new licenses for new media. And there was a big competition. For every license, there were 10-15 people who wanted to get it. They paid a lot, so they tried to pay me bribes, all this type of thing. I became so famous, you can’t imagine. Every year during my birthday or on the 8th of March, which is Women’s Day, all our office, 200 square meters, was full of flowers. Everyone sent me flowers. Everyone sent me champagne for the New Year to celebrate this New Year. And all of our employees took home one bottle of excellent Dom Perignon.
I was smart. I always told them: “Guys, I'm not taking money, don’t bribe. Flowers – thank you. But if you’d like to help us, Internews, I will be happy if you come and teach. Give a lecture, free of charge. Give your knowledge to our young generation of journalists. Don't try to bribe me.” Anyway, I became very famous and we, Internews, became very famous. Which means we’ve become very interesting for the FSB*, because of Americans and Europeans and the millions of dollars. They tried to follow us. They tried to follow us, follow us, follows us, and tried to find some reason to come and do something. And in 2007, I was in Paris, and I asked for money from my friend Eric Johnson. I went back to Moscow with €9,000 in my pocket. When I went through customs, they said, “Manana Albertovna, where did you come from?” I said, “Paris.” I went through the green lane. “We want to put your luggage to the screen.” I said, “Please, take it.” “How much money you have?” I told them that I have 9,000 euros, probably around 9,500 euros. And he immediately said, “You know that you’ve broken the law?” I said, ‘No, the law says 10,000 without declaration, if it less than 10,000, you don't have to declare.” And I had 9,000, 9,000 something, I had rubles euros etc. “No, you don't understand,” he told me, “This is about dollars, but you have euros.” At that time €9,000 was more than $10,000 because the cost [exchange rate] of the euro and dollars was different.
They took our money and tried to open a criminal investigation against me personally. But it was against me, and I thought, “Sorry, I am ready to pay all the penalty money. I openly showed you. I don’t hide because I don't understand the law.” I told them lots of things, but they didn’t listen to me. And in two days after that about 20 people from the FSB came to our office and took all our computers, documents, everything. It was called a seizure, and we called for a lawyer. The lawyer came and said, “Okay, guys, this is a private person, and this private person is guilty, but you have no rights according to Russian law to take all organization’s property, organizational documents, computers, these type of things. It's against the law. It's against everything.” But they didn’t pay attention. They took everything and left the office. They took even the small microwave. They took all the servers, computers, this type of things and our work was paralyzed. And I became the subject of news in all the media in the former Soviet Union. When I googled my name, I discovered about 300,000 mentions of my name.
Daniel Satinsky Wow.
Manana Aslamazyan It’s a horrible thing to become the subject of the news, you know. But I was lucky because people really respected me and respected the organization. People started to protect us. There were a few documentaries about me, and how good Internews was. Some 2,500 journalists, only journalists, not the people around the world, signed a petition to Putin, telling him “She’s not guilty.” All the famous journalists protected me, telling in the interviews a lot of stuff. But this investigation was still going on. We tried to go to court and say that this investigation was unfair. I am guilty. Penalize, punish me, don't punish the organization. No one paid attention and they told our lawyer, “We're going to arrest her. We're going to arrest her. We're going to arrest her.” And my employees and I decided that I have to leave the country. And in 2007, I moved to Paris. I was lucky enough. I used to have an open visa, and we have Internews in Paris. I moved to Paris to stay with Eric Johnson, my friend, who used to live there at that time. They have excellent apartments. I even had the key because I always stayed with him. They had two floors, huge apartment. His wife is a very expensive lawyer for rich people. And I used to have my room in these apartments. I moved to Paris to stay there until everything was finished. Nothing's happened.
Then our Board met, it happened in probably January, if I remember correctly. Sometimes our Board in Russia, we convened together, me by phone. And we discussed a lot what to do with Internews. We decided to close out Internews because it was very difficult at that time for TV stations and journalists to work with us. We put them in a difficult situation, if they wanted to communicate with us. They immediately became a subject of some sort of investigation in their city. We didn’t need to put these people in this difficult situation. We made our own decision and closed out our organization. Based on Russian law, we had to distribute everything what belonged to us to the different organizations. We gave everything to local organizations, paid the last money to our employees and they started to look for new jobs, because many of them were excellent journalists. Some of them were immediately hired, some of them not, but anyway. And I was still in Paris without work, without Internews, without money, without anything. And it was a very difficult time for me, even I got support. Two documentary film makers came to Paris to take interview and produce a documentary about me. As I say, it was very good exam, this strange situation. On the one hand, I recognized how many friends and what kind of love I have. And in the meantime, who is the real friend and who is not.
In 2007, when I was in Paris, we used to have Internews Europe in Paris, sister organization. And it was run by a guy from London. And he said, “You know, you live in Paris. There is no way probably for you go back to Russia. You're going to stay here. Come to work for Internews Europe, even replace myself. I would like to go and write my books, and it would be very good, because you know Internews very well. Your Internews Russia was bigger than Internews Europe. Let us hire you as a head of Internews Europe.” I said, “Guys, I don't speak French at all. I don't speak English well. I always need someone to translate.” My English for discussing right now without any... I don't know grammar. I never studied English in my life. In school and in university I studied German. I speak Armenian, Russian, Georgian, a little bit German, but my English was only from listening. Vince, Paul Greenberg, they talked next to me, and I listened, and watched some movies. And I learned by myself. This is why I have no pronunciation. I don't know the grammar. I don't know how to put all the verbs or write. Anyway, how I can run the European organization. They said, “We have people in the office, who speak very good Russian, they can help you. We're going to hire you,” and they hired me as a director of Internews Europe. And from 2008 until 2012, I ran Internews Europe without French. I got the work permission etc. But then I decided that I don't want this. It's very difficult for me. I would like to be an excellent director. If I always have to ask someone to help me to understand, help me express myself, it's not interesting. For that reason, I told my colleagues in Internews Europe that I would like to leave, and I left in 2012. But as an Internews Network employee, I moved to Armenia, worked there for two years as head of the project. But during this time, I always tried to apply to the different courts. And finally, I got the permission. I went to the many different level of the courts: regional, government, the state, the city court, the government court. Finally, I got to the level when I could apply to the Constitutional Court, which is the highest level in the Soviet Union [Russia], and I applied to this Constitutional Court. And for some reason they found me not guilty. But it happened after two years. You know, they recognized: okay, she lives there, why we should care about that. They find some reason to tell everyone “She is not guilty.” They gave me money back. My brother went for them [the money].
Daniel Satinsky 9,000 euros?
Manana Aslamazyan It was very funny. But at that time, I used to live in Paris, and I decided not to go back. I went back to Moscow in 2014 or 2015.
Manana Aslamazyan Now I'm based here in Moscow as an independent advisor for Internews and I work as an advisor for the Internews project in Central Asia. We have four countries there: Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. As an advisor every day I start Zoom with the teams. I help them to find the trainers, to put the good schedule for the seminar, to organize the production competition. I’m working for Internews and every day I'm waiting when this Russian government who accepted new law about foreign…
Daniel Satinsky Foreign agent law.
Manana Aslamazyan Another step to develop this media business. But it’s not only that. In these years we also recognized: when I am the owner of a TV channel and I’m going to do advertising for my local drugstore or my local bakery, I can ask them for a hundred rubles and put this address of this bakery on my TV screen. But it's not enough to make real money. I would like to get to big budgets and big budgets exist only in Moscow. In my city, there are not too many big budget advertisers who are ready to pay a lot of money. Then they decide: if I am the owner of a TV station, even in Yekaterinburg, which is the third biggest city in Russia, the number of my viewers is not enough to be attractive for big business. It would be interesting to try to organize somehow a TV station union. At that time, we already used to organize the heads of advertising departments of Russian TV channels association. Let's say I am the head of advertising department in Yekaterinburg, another one is the head of the advertising department in Novgorod, in Oryol etc. All of them together came to our seminars and is some sort of way exchanged information how to work with advertisers. And they think: if we come together to the big advertisers, probably we can get a lot of money. For that reason, after one of the seminars about management, a few TV managers decided: let's think how we can organize some sort of TV network. What is a TV network? Network is something which exists in the U.S.: CBS, NBC, etc. And how does it work? There is the independent station in each American city, but they have special programs, which belong to the network. CBS produces The Oprah Winfrey Show. Someone creates the Oprah Winfrey show and sells it to CBS. And the broadcast the Oprah Winfrey Show. Each independent, more or less independent channel in U.S.: channel in Boston, channel in San Francisco, they broadcast this Oprah Winfrey Show. They do not produce that show. They just broadcast it because they are members of CBS network. Our guys decided: let’s organize our network. And they organized network, called Independent Broadcasting System.
Daniel Satinsky Great.
Manana Aslamazyan They signed an agreement among themselves. And the agreement says: we're going to buy rights for everyone to broadcast for four hours, and we promise to broadcast in these four hours. It can be a feature films, documentaries, some sort of programs. We’re going to broadcast the same TV shows, the same movies, the same documentaries, the same everything every day. And then we come to an advertiser in Moscow and say: we have 60 cities that every day show the best American documentary at 8 p.m. local time. We would like to offer you this audience. Will you buy our viewers? And we organized this independent network. Meg Gaydosik and Bob Campbell and other very famous people who ran media in U.S. and even came to Russia and lived there for about a year, half year, etc. They helped us to create this independent TV network, and this network also hired two young Americans: Paul Mitcher and another guy, [Mitchell] Rosenbaum. I don't remember. They became our sellers for this independent network. They went to Russian advertisers, they went to Coca-Cola, they went to the lot of-
Daniel Satinsky Mars and Proctor and Gamble…
Manana Aslamazyan …McDonalds. You can show your advertising not only on the federal TV channels, but also on local channels. It's much better because there is a very good trust in local channels and this is very good. We can advertise not Coca-Cola in general, but we also can advertise those who sell Coca-Cola in this city. Put the local number there. It was very smart idea. And this Independent Broadcasting System, that's what it was called. Independent Broadcasting System, they organized about 60 big channels in it.
Daniel Satinsky This was in 50 cities? 60. And was the content mostly American? What was the content?
Manana Aslamazyan Content was American, French, Russian. There were a lot of different… But the movies are definitely the most attractive thing. And we bought a few TV series from the Brazil, soap operas. The soap opera was very popular. It was very cheap; it was easy to broadcast. There were about 200 episodes, and it lasted a long time. We bought it for $100 per hour, and it was for all this independent system. It was really cheap, and it was really great.
Manana Aslamazyan Last two things which I would like to tell you about these years. At the end of 90’, there few other things started to grow in Soviet Russia at that time.
Manana Aslamazyan Anyway, what was going on in the meantime. In the meantime, there was... What's the name of the head of CNN?
Daniel Satinsky Ted Turner.
Manana Aslamazyan Yes. Ted Turner. He's also become interested in Russia and wanted to come to Russia to do business. And he organized one of the first… Probably at the same time, 93’, I don't remember exactly. With Eduard Sagalaev, who is the one of the very famous Russian producers and rich guy, they organized this TV-6 channel which was an American channel. They got a license, and TV-6 was one the first real businesses in Russia. TV-6 also tried to get the license for different cities and organize these things and something like that. Which mean this IBS, Independent Broadcasting System grew up in competition with TV-6, with a channel that belonged to Ted Turner. You can read a little bit about it. Ted Turner had a lot of interviews about that, and you don't need me to tell the story. That's the first thing. The second is that there was not only Ted Turner, we used to have lot of good American teaching. And a lot of rich guys in the Soviet Union decided “I also would like to open a TV station in Moscow.” They started to open independent TV stations, privately owned independent TV stations in Moscow. They put in a lot of money and got broadcast licenses for Moscow. But very soon they recognized that they can make good money from the Moscow-based advertisers, because they have the broadcast for Moscow. But they don't have the whole Soviet Union. They would like to cover all Russia, let's say the Russia first. And they started to think how to do that. They recognized that there are a lot of local TV stations in these cities. At that time, about 1998, we used to have a catalog of these TV stations, and we had very good Internet resource. And we used to have about 2,500 TV stations in our catalog.
It was even more, because if we count also newspapers, all independent media probably there were about 15,000. But for only TV stations, which used to be in our catalog, there were 2,500. I can show you. We even published a book about that. And these people from Moscow thought that it's very interesting. “Probably I can get an agreement with some local station.” And they tried to hunt these local stations. In the meantime, there was one of these Russian-based broadcasters called REN-TV. And it was organized by a very independent woman, very brave, very, very, very smart. She sold her apartments to organize the TV channel. Really, sold her apartment. She had a very good experience in producing programs in the former Soviet Union. She produced one of the best TV programs called Kinopanorama, it was a show about cinema. She knew a lot of people, everybody knew her. She was very famous. She was very brave and very independent. And she sold her excellent apartment. And her husband used to be a former dissident, Maksimov, who left Russia many, many years ago.
Daniel Satinsky What was her name?
Manana Aslamazyan Irena Lesnevskaya. She organized this REN-TV because her name is “Irena.” She broadcasted only in Moscow. And because I knew her personally and I loved her and I trusted her, I came up with an idea. I talked to this IBS guy. I told them, guys, you have licenses in 60 cities. She has license in Moscow. It would be very good if we can make a deal and create a real network of the channels with the broadcasting licenses in Moscow and in many, many cities. I talked to the Board of this IBS and called Irena and said: Irena Stefanovna, I would like to bring you five guys who have a license in the biggest Russian cities: Nizhniy Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, St Petersburg and Tomsk. And we would like to talk with you. And she said, please come!
We came to her and immediately they decided to make a deal and to create Ren-TV – NVS (IBS) and they started to work. There were a lot of details, I don't want to go too deep into. If you would like me to tell about this story, we can maybe talk another time. We created this REN-TV - NVS story. And not only REN-TV, at that time we organized something called TNT in Moscow, one channel from Moscow CTC, which is privately owned right now. They even went IPO in US, CTC channel. You know it?
Daniel Satinsky Yeah. There was a guy…
Manana Aslamazyan Alexander Rodnyansky.
Daniel Satinsky Okay.
Manana Aslamazyan They really went IPO. Mikhail Khodorkovsky started to buy some the TV channels...
Daniel Satinsky These years Gusinsky also had his...
Manana Aslamazyan Oh, Gusinsky! I forgot, the biggest one was NTV, the biggest one was Gusinsky and NTV. And I would like to tell you, when Gusinsky started to make NTV first things what they did. It was probably in 93”. [He hired] One day the NTV editor in chief Oleg Dobrodeev, who is now running the government TV called Russia-RTR, this is big transformation happened to this guy. The second guy was Yevgeny Kiselyov, a journalist who right now lives in Kyiv. It’s not Dmitry Kiselyov. There are two Kiselyovs: Yevgeny (“Eugene”) Kiselyov and Dmitry. Yevgeny Kiselyov is persona non grata in Russia and he lives in Ukraine. and he is doing his Sunday show. [He hired] Yevgeny Kiselyov and Igor Malashenko, who was a chief executive director of this Gusinsky’s channel. Gusinsky was the owner. He hired these three best guys at that time to make his TV channel. They called me and came to our office, to Internews. I was shocked. They were stars! Why they came to me? We were doing renovation in the office, we just moved to this office. There was a small room full of people and these three big guys came, all about two meters tall, and famous and everyone know them. And they came to my office and said: ‘We know you are Americans, working with Americans. We are looking for the journalists around the city. Can you help us to find good journalists in different cities, to create our network of journalists?” They didn't want to create network or broadcasters; they would like to create a network of journalists. I gave them a lot of addresses, and we worked with NTV very closely. Until Gusinsky sold NTV and NTV became a horrible channel, we were very friendly, really close with NTV, a lot of NTV journalists taught at our seminars, all the stars. There was NTV “before” and “after”. NTV “before” was an excellent channel, independent TV channel, but a little bit maybe too politicized and became… I think right now about CNN. In the beginning CNN was totally balanced media. Every word was truth, we knew it’s the truth. When Trump, Trumpism came, all this type of things came, sometimes we see, the CNN is against [Trump], they don’t keep the balance. Because they became an opinionated journalism.
And this also happened in the Soviet Union [Russia]. Sometimes NTV became too opinionated because they would like to support Yeltsin's people against some communists, something like that. They lost the independence. They lost the balance and found themselves in a dangerous situation. About many media organizations today which started in early 90s, when we talk about it among us, we always add a few words: “Gazeta.ru before or Gazeta.ru after.” Its name is still Gazeta.ru, but two different media. NTV before – it was excellent, and the NTV after… I don't have button for this channel on my remote. I mean NTV doesn't exist for me at all. REN-TV, which I helped to create and grow and make excellent doesn't exist for me anymore. It became horrible, horrible, horrible. All these things at the end of 90s and beginning of 2000s I would say, somehow there was a boundary line. For different media in different years, but it's probably end of 90s and beginning of 2000s, sometime 2003-2005. It depends on how long the owner could keep his independence.
It happened to the big media, it happened to the small media, private media, local media, the regional media, all these things happened during these 2000s. These TV channels owned by Gusinsky, Berezovsky, Lesnevskaya started to buy local media, started to pay them money. [They were actually buying] license: one license two licenses. And by the end of 2002, maybe 2003, we used to have for example four big networks: TV-6, NTV, REN-TV, TNT, CTC – five big networks, who either had agreements with the local broadcasters or owned local media as a business unit. Even at that time they were more or less independent. We used to organize the Russian American Media Entrepreneurship Dialogue in 2002. It was initiated by USAID. I would like to send you materials about this Dialogue, Unfortunately I only have printed materials because when Internews closed in Russia, they took everything. I don’t have an archive on my computer, but I can scan this material and show you this Russian American Media Entrepreneurship Dialog which happened din the US, including US media and businessmen. It started probably at the same time as the Russian American business dialogue. It was 2002, 2003. I don't know if you have some connection with that.
Daniel Satinsky I remember that period, so yeah.
Manana Aslamazyan There was supposed to be a meeting with the two presidents.
Daniel Satinsky Gore–Chernomyrdin Commission.
Manana Aslamazyan And before that they organized these dialogs. Internews was one of the organizers for the media entrepreneurship dialog. At that time, we used to have really independent media. Even the Minister of Mass Media, Mikhail Lesin, who was killed in Washington many years ago, probably, you know this story. At that time, when we were organizing the conference, he said: “Government must leave the media. Media have to be private. Media must be independent,” They promised a lot of interesting things. But starting from 2004, 2005, the government and the oligarchs who were controlled by and were very close to government, started to buy everything. Right now, we don't have independent TV on the federal, regional level at all. We have independent media, I would say online media, a lot of online media, very small, very poor, but online media. One independent TV channel which broadcasts is the TV station “Rain,” which is right now in a difficult situation. And we still have probably a few locally owned TV channels which definitely are very weak and for them it’s very difficult to survive. Most of the owners, who became too rich, sold their businesses to rich people and bought villas on the Cote d'Azur or somewhere else. Most of them have left the country, live in U.S, in Europe, because they sold so well the TV stations. They live without working, as rentier for the end of their life, even aren’t starting to do new business. Because it's very difficult when you have the hundreds of millions on your account and you moved from your country to another, it's very difficult to start a new business. As one of them told me, “I didn't go to school with these people. I didn't go to university. They are not my friends. I don't understand them. It's better to put the money in an investment fund and live off the interest. I'm not taking the risk to do the new business in foreign country.” Most of them are doing that.
That's the story about the end of independent television in Russia. My personal story was totally different. And I don't know if you're interested in that, but independent… Oh, two things I would like to say, why do they always say, “Ask Manana, ask Manana!”
Until ‘94, we had this Internews representative office in Moscow. I used to have an American director, Vince Malgren. I used to have training coordinator Paul Greenberg. I used to have the program manager Meg Gaydosik. I used to have a lot of Americans who worked there. I also worked as an administrator, as an executive, some sort of executive. But what is very good about Russians, I don't know how you feel about that, but we learn very fast.
Daniel Satinsky Yes.
Manana Aslamazyan All of us would like to take care about our business. In ’94 Vince decided to leave the country after the three years in Moscow. He said, “I would like to go back. To be honest, I feel very sorry. My salary is ten times more than yours, but you work ten times more than me, and I feel sorry about that. I would like to recommend that you as a director.” My salary was about 1,000 or 500, I don't remember.
I said, “Oh, Vince, I can’t, I'm not working for Internews. I have just a temporary contract as a CEO. But you know what I would like? I would like to organize our Russian Internews as a Russian organization, not as a representative office.” And we started to discuss these things. Vince moved back, and we discussed it with David and with everyone. And in ’97 15 Russian citizens plus the Persephone Miel, who used to work for Internews Network, but lived in Russia, we set up the new organization called Internews Russia. We closed out the representative office. We registered the Russian-owned organization and called it “Internews Russia.” It's exactly the name. I became president of this organization and started to work. When the Internews Network, the US-based organization, got the grants, they took it from USAID, took part of this money for their own employees and sent the grant to us. But we started to have opportunity to apply not only to USAID but not only to US-based donors. We started to do fundraising from European organizations, from Russian foundations. We got money from the MacArthur Foundation. We got money from Ford Foundation. We got money from the European Endowment for Democracy, from the European Union, TACIS Program. There're lot of European donors based there. In the beginning of 2000s, we used to be the richest, biggest Russian NGO, who were run by a Russian citizen. We had a good relationship with the European donors, with European partners, because we kept the name of Internews. I used to be a member of the Internews Network Board, and every year I went to the Board Meeting. I was always joking: “I am an Armenian woman, who lives in Russia. I am excellent candidate as a board member, because of my gender, nationality.
Daniel Satinsky Perfect.
Manana Aslamazyan For many years I used to be a Board member for Internews Network and Internews Europe. Anyway, we organized this Internews Russia, called Internews, autonomous non-profit organization. We had a very good board. We had Americans in our board, we had Russian people on our board, definitely. And donors from all around the world, and donors even from the Russian oligarchs. Mikhail Khodorkovsky gave us the first grant, $1 million. There was an excellent oligarch whose name is Dmitry Zimin, he gave us grant. Anyway, the Russian oligarchs also gave us money, sometimes even the TV stations we helped grow. They gave us small amounts of money, but they gave as a thank you for everything we taught them. We became the biggest Russian NGO with the budget about $5 or $7 millions per year, about 65 full time employees. There were 100-200 part time employees. We were in charge of everything, everything, everything what was going on in Russia about media. I remember that the government at that time tried to put the licensing process into order. They even invited me as one of the three independent members in this license committee, and I participated. Every month we give a lot of new licenses for new media. And there was a big competition. For every license, there were 10-15 people who wanted to get it. They paid a lot, so they tried to pay me bribes, all this type of thing. I became so famous, you can’t imagine. Every year during my birthday or on the 8th of March, which is Women’s Day, all our office, 200 square meters, was full of flowers. Everyone sent me flowers. Everyone sent me champagne for the New Year to celebrate this New Year. And all of our employees took home one bottle of excellent Dom Perignon.
I was smart. I always told them: “Guys, I'm not taking money, don’t bribe. Flowers – thank you. But if you’d like to help us, Internews, I will be happy if you come and teach. Give a lecture, free of charge. Give your knowledge to our young generation of journalists. Don't try to bribe me.” Anyway, I became very famous and we, Internews, became very famous. Which means we’ve become very interesting for the FSB*, because of Americans and Europeans and the millions of dollars. They tried to follow us. They tried to follow us, follow us, follows us, and tried to find some reason to come and do something. And in 2007, I was in Paris, and I asked for money from my friend Eric Johnson. I went back to Moscow with €9,000 in my pocket. When I went through customs, they said, “Manana Albertovna, where did you come from?” I said, “Paris.” I went through the green lane. “We want to put your luggage to the screen.” I said, “Please, take it.” “How much money you have?” I told them that I have 9,000 euros, probably around 9,500 euros. And he immediately said, “You know that you’ve broken the law?” I said, ‘No, the law says 10,000 without declaration, if it less than 10,000, you don't have to declare.” And I had 9,000, 9,000 something, I had rubles euros etc. “No, you don't understand,” he told me, “This is about dollars, but you have euros.” At that time €9,000 was more than $10,000 because the cost [exchange rate] of the euro and dollars was different.
They took our money and tried to open a criminal investigation against me personally. But it was against me, and I thought, “Sorry, I am ready to pay all the penalty money. I openly showed you. I don’t hide because I don't understand the law.” I told them lots of things, but they didn’t listen to me. And in two days after that about 20 people from the FSB came to our office and took all our computers, documents, everything. It was called a seizure, and we called for a lawyer. The lawyer came and said, “Okay, guys, this is a private person, and this private person is guilty, but you have no rights according to Russian law to take all organization’s property, organizational documents, computers, these type of things. It's against the law. It's against everything.” But they didn’t pay attention. They took everything and left the office. They took even the small microwave. They took all the servers, computers, this type of things and our work was paralyzed. And I became the subject of news in all the media in the former Soviet Union. When I googled my name, I discovered about 300,000 mentions of my name.
Daniel Satinsky Wow.
Manana Aslamazyan It’s a horrible thing to become the subject of the news, you know. But I was lucky because people really respected me and respected the organization. People started to protect us. There were a few documentaries about me, and how good Internews was. Some 2,500 journalists, only journalists, not the people around the world, signed a petition to Putin, telling him “She’s not guilty.” All the famous journalists protected me, telling in the interviews a lot of stuff. But this investigation was still going on. We tried to go to court and say that this investigation was unfair. I am guilty. Penalize, punish me, don't punish the organization. No one paid attention and they told our lawyer, “We're going to arrest her. We're going to arrest her. We're going to arrest her.” And my employees and I decided that I have to leave the country. And in 2007, I moved to Paris. I was lucky enough. I used to have an open visa, and we have Internews in Paris. I moved to Paris to stay with Eric Johnson, my friend, who used to live there at that time. They have excellent apartments. I even had the key because I always stayed with him. They had two floors, huge apartment. His wife is a very expensive lawyer for rich people. And I used to have my room in these apartments. I moved to Paris to stay there until everything was finished. Nothing's happened.
Then our Board met, it happened in probably January, if I remember correctly. Sometimes our Board in Russia, we convened together, me by phone. And we discussed a lot what to do with Internews. We decided to close out Internews because it was very difficult at that time for TV stations and journalists to work with us. We put them in a difficult situation, if they wanted to communicate with us. They immediately became a subject of some sort of investigation in their city. We didn’t need to put these people in this difficult situation. We made our own decision and closed out our organization. Based on Russian law, we had to distribute everything what belonged to us to the different organizations. We gave everything to local organizations, paid the last money to our employees and they started to look for new jobs, because many of them were excellent journalists. Some of them were immediately hired, some of them not, but anyway. And I was still in Paris without work, without Internews, without money, without anything. And it was a very difficult time for me, even I got support. Two documentary film makers came to Paris to take interview and produce a documentary about me. As I say, it was very good exam, this strange situation. On the one hand, I recognized how many friends and what kind of love I have. And in the meantime, who is the real friend and who is not.
In 2007, when I was in Paris, we used to have Internews Europe in Paris, sister organization. And it was run by a guy from London. And he said, “You know, you live in Paris. There is no way probably for you go back to Russia. You're going to stay here. Come to work for Internews Europe, even replace myself. I would like to go and write my books, and it would be very good, because you know Internews very well. Your Internews Russia was bigger than Internews Europe. Let us hire you as a head of Internews Europe.” I said, “Guys, I don't speak French at all. I don't speak English well. I always need someone to translate.” My English for discussing right now without any... I don't know grammar. I never studied English in my life. In school and in university I studied German. I speak Armenian, Russian, Georgian, a little bit German, but my English was only from listening. Vince, Paul Greenberg, they talked next to me, and I listened, and watched some movies. And I learned by myself. This is why I have no pronunciation. I don't know the grammar. I don't know how to put all the verbs or write. Anyway, how I can run the European organization. They said, “We have people in the office, who speak very good Russian, they can help you. We're going to hire you,” and they hired me as a director of Internews Europe. And from 2008 until 2012, I ran Internews Europe without French. I got the work permission etc. But then I decided that I don't want this. It's very difficult for me. I would like to be an excellent director. If I always have to ask someone to help me to understand, help me express myself, it's not interesting. For that reason, I told my colleagues in Internews Europe that I would like to leave, and I left in 2012. But as an Internews Network employee, I moved to Armenia, worked there for two years as head of the project. But during this time, I always tried to apply to the different courts. And finally, I got the permission. I went to the many different level of the courts: regional, government, the state, the city court, the government court. Finally, I got to the level when I could apply to the Constitutional Court, which is the highest level in the Soviet Union [Russia], and I applied to this Constitutional Court. And for some reason they found me not guilty. But it happened after two years. You know, they recognized: okay, she lives there, why we should care about that. They find some reason to tell everyone “She is not guilty.” They gave me money back. My brother went for them [the money].
Daniel Satinsky 9,000 euros?
Manana Aslamazyan It was very funny. But at that time, I used to live in Paris, and I decided not to go back. I went back to Moscow in 2014 or 2015.
Manana Aslamazyan Now I'm based here in Moscow as an independent advisor for Internews and I work as an advisor for the Internews project in Central Asia. We have four countries there: Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. As an advisor every day I start Zoom with the teams. I help them to find the trainers, to put the good schedule for the seminar, to organize the production competition. I’m working for Internews and every day I'm waiting when this Russian government who accepted new law about foreign…
Daniel Satinsky Foreign agent law.
Manana Aslamazyan Foreign agents. When they come and tell me I am foreign agent.
I will have to leave to country again and go to France. But I have rights. I still have this “carte de séjour européen” or the green card until 2024 and I am able to apply for French citizenship. But I don't want to. I am a Russian citizen. I would really like to go to France and back and don't apply for a visa, travel to all Schengen countries. But this is my country, my family, my son, my grandson, my brothers, everything. And this is language that I really know and can express myself very well, and I have a lot of respect here. That's why I still keep staying here until it will be dangerous. I hope I will have time to go back to France, at least to France. That's the idea. Or Armenia, I don’t know. That's all about myself , that’s all about the Internews. I think we're talking too long.
Daniel Satinsky Question two is, do you think that Americans had a lasting influence on Russia or was it a temporary influence? That's the, you know, being washed away.
Manana Aslamazyan That's the very interesting question, because in my opinion, the relationship between ordinary Russian citizens and the U.S. changed a lot during the different time. In the early 90s, end of 80s and early 90s, they were thinking that America is the heaven, and everyone would like to go to the heaven. We were jealous for people who live in the country and went to America because they have real democracy, real opportunities, real everything. Everyone feel jealousy and everyone, even during the Soviet time, they were a little bit afraid. But the Yeltsin’s times, Gorbachev's times, really changed that attention. But there are a few things that happened in the meantime. After these Russian emigrants who came to [the U.S.] to make good money recognized it's not so easy. They started to criticize everything what going on in U.S. They tried to vote for Republicans. They tried to hate other emigrants. “We have rights because we are educated nation came to U.S., right, but there are Mexican who came to U.S. They hate them. We hate the black people, Mexicans, Haitians and all these people. We are the best. We are the educated Russians. I have a university diploma, and for some reason no one cares about my university diploma and I'm working as a taxi driver.” Probably a little bit like Indian people, but Indian are probably more modest than Russians. We first started getting this information from Russians who live there. It's not heaven, there are lot of problems in America.
In the meantime, Americans were very… It's difficult to feel, you know, Russians started to think, feel as small brothers with big brothers who always teach them how to live. Sometimes it good, but sometimes you don’t have so much respect. Why I liked so much people from Internews. I will tell you the truth because they were real democrats who really criticized the U.S. on the same level as the Soviet Union. They were against anything against the freedom of expression. Let’s say like that. And I trusted David Hoffman even he's American and he taught me because I respect him. I trusted Vince Malgren and Paul Greenberg a lot because I know we think on same level, we have the same values for many things, and we are the same.
But ordinary people [Russians] feel like these big brothers always teach us. “We are the biggest country around the world. We are more than Canada. We are bigger than anything. Why they only teach us.” And it was this tension, this attitude became very, very important when Putin came to the power. They always try to keep saying this “why they teach us, why they teach us. We are the biggest country. We have the oil.” And until 2010, I would say it worked, but it did not work so well, because we used to be rich, and people became richer and richer and right. And now when people become not so rich, they lose their money – they need some enemy. And right now, in my opinion, unfortunately our ordinary people think that America was guilty for everything. Not Europe, but America is guilty because they are rich. They are still rich, and they teach us how to live. “Why I have to respect this ‘Black lives matter.’ They killed all the black people and now they're apologizing to black people, to Native Americans. All this LGBT and all this harassment, all these things, they try to go against our ‘traditional values’, and we as a nation have a such patriotic values.”
And we listen to it every day from each… We’re joking “even the clothing irons broadcast propaganda against the foreign values, foreign things.” This is why I think in the situation today, even the smart people, who really understand how important America is, and how important its values, even these people who still respect and express their attitudes towards harassment, LGBT, freedom of expression, democracy, which has become a swear word in Russia… These people become the enemy! Not only Americans are the enemy. We, people who respect these things, we became the enemy. They always tell us: “Go to your America, if you don't like this. We are going to keep our president. We like our president, our “sovereign democracy,” sovereign values. And if you respect them, their values, you can leave the country, we don't need you.” That’s why people have become very aggressive. That's why situation is so bad. We started to talk not openly. When we talk by phone, we always say like during the Soviet time “this isn't a phone conversation,” let's meet and talk. We go the kitchen, at this kitchen discussion, every time. And it's started in the 2000s and definitely became very deep after Crimea. Crimea was the thing that divided us into two nations. Young generation, even they ignore everything. They live their proud life and don’t care about politics, everything like that. Either they go to other countries or they become patriots. And it's very dangerous because these patriots can take the gun or do something else. They can make the fire with the oppositions or beat them on the streets, something like that. This is really very bad. And this fear to openly express yourself… Every time when I even met my friends who I know for about 40 years, who used to work in the theater, I try to ask them a few questions and recognize [try to find out] what he thinks, is Crimea ours or not ours? To me, that's immediately some sort of sign. I don't go deep to the political questions. I talk about flowers, life, kids, everything. But not about the very important questions for me. This is a really bad situation. Is it clear what I mean?
Manana Aslamazyan I'm not afraid. I’m really open with you. I would like to ask if you, after everything, would like to give you the names of those who did the media business, who helped us to do the business
Daniel Satinsky Yeah. I would love it if you could do that, it would be very helpful. Because apart from the ideological level, the impact, it seems to me. You transformed the way media business is done, formed it, and modernized it, and made it have international practice and that-
Manana Aslamazyan I would like to be honest, it’s not only Internews. As I said, Russians can learn. It's definitely Eduard Sagalaev with Ted Turner. It’s definitely Gusinsky who knows what to do, who did different businesses, and he came to do this business. Because of Alexander Rodnyansky, who ran CTC, came to U.S. and organized his production company because he would like to become a cinema producer. Roman Petrenko, who also ran the TNT network, also moved to U.S. and opened in Los Angeles his business. Many people travel, many media people go abroad. Many people go to NAB conferences, National Association of Broadcasters. They have good relationships with producers who produce documentaries, feature films. All these people really changed the media business. And we tried to do the business as a good U.S. private business, not dirty, but good, because we know that the business in U.S. also can be different.
Daniel Satinsky Can be different. Yeah, right.
Manana Aslamazyan But Internews for the regional TV stations around Russia was probably the main source of information and main source of information.
Daniel Satinsky Yeah. And that is really a lasting impact and a very important one, which is part of the story I'm trying to tell.
Manana Aslamazyan I always tell people when they ask about the role of Internews. I told them: The media, independent media will grow without us. If we don’t exist, they will grow without us. They will learn how to do the private business. There’re very strong rules and they will learn how to do the rules. But we put some sort of… When a woman makes a cake, she puts some special powder into the cake to make it bigger. I always compare us with this cake powder, to put in the things to make them bigger. I feel we were as this type of thing. The cake will grow faster and better.
I will have to leave to country again and go to France. But I have rights. I still have this “carte de séjour européen” or the green card until 2024 and I am able to apply for French citizenship. But I don't want to. I am a Russian citizen. I would really like to go to France and back and don't apply for a visa, travel to all Schengen countries. But this is my country, my family, my son, my grandson, my brothers, everything. And this is language that I really know and can express myself very well, and I have a lot of respect here. That's why I still keep staying here until it will be dangerous. I hope I will have time to go back to France, at least to France. That's the idea. Or Armenia, I don’t know. That's all about myself , that’s all about the Internews. I think we're talking too long.
Daniel Satinsky Question two is, do you think that Americans had a lasting influence on Russia or was it a temporary influence? That's the, you know, being washed away.
Manana Aslamazyan That's the very interesting question, because in my opinion, the relationship between ordinary Russian citizens and the U.S. changed a lot during the different time. In the early 90s, end of 80s and early 90s, they were thinking that America is the heaven, and everyone would like to go to the heaven. We were jealous for people who live in the country and went to America because they have real democracy, real opportunities, real everything. Everyone feel jealousy and everyone, even during the Soviet time, they were a little bit afraid. But the Yeltsin’s times, Gorbachev's times, really changed that attention. But there are a few things that happened in the meantime. After these Russian emigrants who came to [the U.S.] to make good money recognized it's not so easy. They started to criticize everything what going on in U.S. They tried to vote for Republicans. They tried to hate other emigrants. “We have rights because we are educated nation came to U.S., right, but there are Mexican who came to U.S. They hate them. We hate the black people, Mexicans, Haitians and all these people. We are the best. We are the educated Russians. I have a university diploma, and for some reason no one cares about my university diploma and I'm working as a taxi driver.” Probably a little bit like Indian people, but Indian are probably more modest than Russians. We first started getting this information from Russians who live there. It's not heaven, there are lot of problems in America.
In the meantime, Americans were very… It's difficult to feel, you know, Russians started to think, feel as small brothers with big brothers who always teach them how to live. Sometimes it good, but sometimes you don’t have so much respect. Why I liked so much people from Internews. I will tell you the truth because they were real democrats who really criticized the U.S. on the same level as the Soviet Union. They were against anything against the freedom of expression. Let’s say like that. And I trusted David Hoffman even he's American and he taught me because I respect him. I trusted Vince Malgren and Paul Greenberg a lot because I know we think on same level, we have the same values for many things, and we are the same.
But ordinary people [Russians] feel like these big brothers always teach us. “We are the biggest country around the world. We are more than Canada. We are bigger than anything. Why they only teach us.” And it was this tension, this attitude became very, very important when Putin came to the power. They always try to keep saying this “why they teach us, why they teach us. We are the biggest country. We have the oil.” And until 2010, I would say it worked, but it did not work so well, because we used to be rich, and people became richer and richer and right. And now when people become not so rich, they lose their money – they need some enemy. And right now, in my opinion, unfortunately our ordinary people think that America was guilty for everything. Not Europe, but America is guilty because they are rich. They are still rich, and they teach us how to live. “Why I have to respect this ‘Black lives matter.’ They killed all the black people and now they're apologizing to black people, to Native Americans. All this LGBT and all this harassment, all these things, they try to go against our ‘traditional values’, and we as a nation have a such patriotic values.”
And we listen to it every day from each… We’re joking “even the clothing irons broadcast propaganda against the foreign values, foreign things.” This is why I think in the situation today, even the smart people, who really understand how important America is, and how important its values, even these people who still respect and express their attitudes towards harassment, LGBT, freedom of expression, democracy, which has become a swear word in Russia… These people become the enemy! Not only Americans are the enemy. We, people who respect these things, we became the enemy. They always tell us: “Go to your America, if you don't like this. We are going to keep our president. We like our president, our “sovereign democracy,” sovereign values. And if you respect them, their values, you can leave the country, we don't need you.” That’s why people have become very aggressive. That's why situation is so bad. We started to talk not openly. When we talk by phone, we always say like during the Soviet time “this isn't a phone conversation,” let's meet and talk. We go the kitchen, at this kitchen discussion, every time. And it's started in the 2000s and definitely became very deep after Crimea. Crimea was the thing that divided us into two nations. Young generation, even they ignore everything. They live their proud life and don’t care about politics, everything like that. Either they go to other countries or they become patriots. And it's very dangerous because these patriots can take the gun or do something else. They can make the fire with the oppositions or beat them on the streets, something like that. This is really very bad. And this fear to openly express yourself… Every time when I even met my friends who I know for about 40 years, who used to work in the theater, I try to ask them a few questions and recognize [try to find out] what he thinks, is Crimea ours or not ours? To me, that's immediately some sort of sign. I don't go deep to the political questions. I talk about flowers, life, kids, everything. But not about the very important questions for me. This is a really bad situation. Is it clear what I mean?
Manana Aslamazyan I'm not afraid. I’m really open with you. I would like to ask if you, after everything, would like to give you the names of those who did the media business, who helped us to do the business
Daniel Satinsky Yeah. I would love it if you could do that, it would be very helpful. Because apart from the ideological level, the impact, it seems to me. You transformed the way media business is done, formed it, and modernized it, and made it have international practice and that-
Manana Aslamazyan I would like to be honest, it’s not only Internews. As I said, Russians can learn. It's definitely Eduard Sagalaev with Ted Turner. It’s definitely Gusinsky who knows what to do, who did different businesses, and he came to do this business. Because of Alexander Rodnyansky, who ran CTC, came to U.S. and organized his production company because he would like to become a cinema producer. Roman Petrenko, who also ran the TNT network, also moved to U.S. and opened in Los Angeles his business. Many people travel, many media people go abroad. Many people go to NAB conferences, National Association of Broadcasters. They have good relationships with producers who produce documentaries, feature films. All these people really changed the media business. And we tried to do the business as a good U.S. private business, not dirty, but good, because we know that the business in U.S. also can be different.
Daniel Satinsky Can be different. Yeah, right.
Manana Aslamazyan But Internews for the regional TV stations around Russia was probably the main source of information and main source of information.
Daniel Satinsky Yeah. And that is really a lasting impact and a very important one, which is part of the story I'm trying to tell.
Manana Aslamazyan I always tell people when they ask about the role of Internews. I told them: The media, independent media will grow without us. If we don’t exist, they will grow without us. They will learn how to do the private business. There’re very strong rules and they will learn how to do the rules. But we put some sort of… When a woman makes a cake, she puts some special powder into the cake to make it bigger. I always compare us with this cake powder, to put in the things to make them bigger. I feel we were as this type of thing. The cake will grow faster and better.
Federal Security Service
A “propiska” was a permit issued by Soviet authorities that registered a person's place of residence and served as permission to live there.
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